


Intuitive Management

by ezlebe



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Eddie is Richie's Manager, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Codependency, Emetophobia, M/M, Mutual Pining, Psychotropic Drugs, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:35:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 53,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25044733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ezlebe/pseuds/ezlebe
Summary: “Do you need an antiemetic? You were fine like a minute ago,” Eddie snipes, leaning out the door with a harried look. He practically throws a pair of disposable wipes, which land limply on Richie’s shoulder. “Have you been fucking sick this whole time? Why didn’t – ”“No,” Richie croaks, taking the wipes with one hand and lifting the phone back to his ear with the other, then wheezing, “Listen, I got to – ” He hangs up on Mike before he even finishes his own sentence. It’s a dick move, but his head is starting to feel too small, everything is whirling, so maybe he should take Eddie up on those –Holy…shit.“What?” Eddie demands, glaring back with his usual pent up annoyance, only now the expression is ghosted over with a flickering memory of a boy that Richie had entirely forgotten.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 126
Kudos: 450





	1. Chapter 1

“Rich!” A voice demands, as the door swings open from the building, thwacking hard against the railing. “What the hell are you doing?”

Richie looks up from the railing underneath his hands; the puddle two floors down on the sidewalk.

“Do you need an antiemetic? You were fine like a _minute_ ago,” Eddie snipes, leaning further out the door with a harried look. He practically throws a pair of disposable wipes, which land limply on Richie’s shoulder. “Have you been fucking _sick_ this whole time? Why didn’t – ”

“No,” Richie croaks, taking the wipes with one hand and lifting the phone back to his ear with the other, then wheezing, “Listen, I got to – ” He hangs up on Mike before he even finishes his own sentence. It’s a dick move, but his head is starting to feel too small, everything is whirling, so maybe he should take Eddie up on those –

Holy… _shit_.

“What?” Eddie demands, glaring back with his usual pent up annoyance, only now the expression is ghosted over with a flickering memory of a boy that Richie had entirely forgotten. He reaches out, dragging Richie back inside by the lapel and down the dark hall. “Are you sick or are you not sick – you better fucking stop breathing on me if you are.”

“I’m not,” Richie says, swallowing hard; he’s not going to throw up on Eddie. Again. He can’t help a small, pitchy laugh that probably sounds hysterical, but at least that’s not going to make Eddie start ranting about viruses going around. “Probably.”

“ _Okay_ ,” Eddie says, a skeptical slant to his mouth. He stares Richie down a beat longer, then reaches out and straightens the shoulders of his jacket with a yank. “Otherwise, we flew out here for nothing. Ready?”

“Yeah?” Richie repeats, bemused, only to suddenly find himself underneath glaring lights, the heat of them immediately worsening the cold sweat from the call.

He does his best to walk out to the mic with his usual feigned confidence, affectedly straightening out his shirt with a smirk he barely feels – he’s done shows while feeling like shit, so he can do this; it’s just like a hangover. Sort of. He feels a lot worse, actually, but he - He stumbles slightly, risking a glance back; Eddie is staring back at him from the wings, phone up to his ear, in something very near dread.

The nausea rises again and lands all over his feet.

* * *

“I managed to convince most of the venues you’ve got a stomach flu,” Eddie says, his eyes briefly glancing over to make contact with Richie before he drops his head backward to look up at the airport ceiling. “But Mellie and Roger think you’re just having a breakdown and I’m covering for you – we can _maybe_ drag it out to next Monday.”

“Hell no,” Richie says, shaking his head once and forcing out a laugh that rings hollow in the mostly-empty terminal. “I refuse to be in Derry that long.”

Eddie mumbles some agreement, hands twitching together in his lap over his phone like he’s counting off something on his fingers. He exhales hard, abruptly and unsurprisingly livid. “This is really fucked up, Rich.”

Richie shrugs hard, curling into himself to shove his fingers under his glasses and into his eyes. “Fucking Derry.”

“I’ve been standing next to you for five years!” Eddie says, and his furious gesturing is tangible, a hand briefly brushing then disappearing from Richie’s shoulder, making a thumping noise when it lands on Eddie’s leg in a presumed fist. “How the fuck did I not know your face, huh?”

“I don’t know why you’re asking me,” Richie says, exhaling a sigh and letting his glasses fall back over his face; the left lens is smudged to distraction, but he’s having a hard time caring. He probably should’ve asked Eddie where he was from some time over the last five years, but it’s not like Eddie ever asked _him_? It’s just not a conversation they’ve ever had and, really, it was one of the benefits – having to explain to random people that he was _maybe_ traumatized, because he couldn’t remember details up until he was about 18, has always been awkward as fuck.

“You call me all those nicknames,” Eddie says, but it sounds more tired than really accusatory.

“So?” Richie says, shrugging weakly and tracing a box over the floor tiles. “You won’t even call me _my_ name.”

“Richie is a child’s name,” Eddie snaps, a familiar defense for a familiar argument.

“Whatever, _Eddie_ ,” Richie says, flicking his fingers outward without looking at him.

“I tried to get you to call me Edward when we met,” Eddie counters, his voice mostly flat and dry, with just a hint of typical annoyance. “You told me I didn’t _look_ like an Edward.”

Richie had forgotten that, but it was the normal sort of forgetting, where he’d lost a detail he couldn’t care to recall. “Oh, yeah.”

“You know, I – ” Eddie exhales an odd, breathy laugh, shifting in his seat with a creak of leather. “I remembered something when Mike called, more specific than just… everything.”

“Yeah?” Richie says, looking away from the patterned tile to see Eddie staring thoughtfully back at him.

“You throwing up all over Rachel Carter’s shoes,” Eddie says, one of his brows raising while his mouth twitches with a particularly taunting smile. “When she asked you to Homecoming in junior year.”

Richie rolls his lips together when memory comes to him almost as blandly as the Edward thing, as if it’s always been there tucked away, rather than inexplicably repressed to hell and back. “ _Great_.”

“You should use it in your next test set,” Eddie says, looking away and forward, out the wall of windows where their plane is still getting ready for boarding. “Maybe to segue into that bit you’ve been trying to fit in about Tracy at the Guild benefit.”

Richie nods slightly, looking down to his hands and idly tying and untying a loose thread on his shirt. It’s an apt comparison, feeling uneasy and perplexed as a pretty girl tries to flirt with him while Eddie watches from only feet away. “Maybe.”

“It’s got more context now,” Eddie says idly, almost easily, one of his hands dropping from his phone to lightly backhand Richie in the thigh, as if it all doesn’t make sixteen-year-old Richie in the back of forty-year-old Richie’s head immediately start rattling off bullshit excuses. “I thought it was because she was so popular.”

Richie rolls his lips together tight, determined not to let the memory effect how he feels now, and exhales a weak laugh. “You know me, Eds, I only ever wanted one woman on my arm that night.” He leans away when an elbow nudges into his ribs; his second laugh is more genuine. “Done up for a night out in her curlers and muumuu.”

“Shut up!” Eddie demands, reaching out now with swiping hands where his elbow couldn’t reach, following when Richie slips into the next chair over. “You _know_ she’s dead.”

“She’s lost some weight, then,” Richie says, grinning back widely; _how_ could he forget the your mom jokes? He’s got five years of time to make up.

“You’re not fucking funny,” Eddie says, huffing sullenly, offering that not-quite pout in the exact way he used to over twenty years ago.

“Ouch,” Richie says, exaggeratedly clutching at his heart as he falls back into another seat over, almost spreading out across the entire bench. He draws it out until Eddie looks over, then winks, “Tell that to your paycheck.”

Eddie scrunches his nose. “Asshole.”

“Sirs, your flight to Bangor is ready,” a familiar voice interrupts: Hailey, their usual flight attendant, dressed immaculately in a black pantsuit.

“Fucking finally,” Eddie says, standing with an impatience that is little more than performative, lips pressing tight and stretching his back like an old man. “Did the cleaners go through?”

Hailey nods shortly, both hands dropping to fold together at her front. “Yes, Mr Kaspbrak.”

“And the food is fresh, not left out from the previous flight?”

“Of course, sir,” Hailey says, with saint-like patience; she’s one of the few repeat flight attendants they’ve had with this service.

Richie rolls his eyes hard, picking up Eddie’s carry-on and nudging it into his back to try to get him to move. “Eddie, let her _live_.”

“I am not getting food poisoning on my way to fucking _Derry_ ,” Eddie snaps, taking his bag with a scowl and following Hailey when she turns to lead them out to board. “Not everyone enjoys throwing up every ten minutes.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Rich says affably, throwing an arm around Eddie’s shoulder to make him squirm, feeling a little different about it than he did yesterday, but not that different – it’s actually a _lot_ depressing, so easily adding twenty-odd years to his _mooning after Eddie Kaspbrak_ timeline. “You know I can’t control it.”

Eddie inhales sharply, hitting Richie’s knee with the bag in a way that could only be deliberate. “If you took the medication – ”

“I could say so much shit to you about medication, now I’m starting to remember,” Richie says, reluctantly letting his arm drop to let Eddie precede him into the plane, “But I won’t, because I’m so nice.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says, pausing at the entrance near the pilot’s cabin to look in on Hailey. “I need gin.”

“Yes, sir,” Hailey says brightly, gesturing with an open palm. “Gimlet or negroni?”

“Negroni, please,” Eddie says, slumping into one of the calf leather seats with a deep sigh. He pulls his phone out, lashes barely flickering when Rich takes a seat right next to him rather than one of the ten others in slightly less statistically safe areas. “I made us reservations at the Townhouse on its website, but who knows if that was a scam.”

Richie nods slowly, trying to remember if he knows where that is – downtown, maybe, but on the edge of it, way, way down from the shops and not even on the parade route. He can sort of imagine walking past it, peeking into the darkened doors from the sidewalk.

“So you’re really not going to shave?”

“For the millionth time,” Eddie says, swiping up and then down, tapping a presumed message, then swiping down again, “No. And the fact it emasculates you – ”

“It doesn’t emasculate me,” Rich denies, though that is sort of a lie, but in a way where he’s had maybe a fantasy or six of Eddie and his stupid beard bearing down on him in various backstage chairs and hotel settees across the country; he’s not sure if it still _counts_ as emasculation at that point. He drops his voice, affecting a stern tone. “I’m just worried no one is going to recognize you, General Zod.”

Eddie glances sideways from under his brows, a patronizing little twitch at the corner of his mouth. “The _fact_ it emasculates you is all the more reason to keep it.”

Richie answers the stare with his own, attempting to be superior, but Eddie’s steady smugness quickly has a heat crawling up the back of his neck. The whole Derry thing is a realization he did _not_ need, not right now, when he’d _sort of_ been working up to asking Eddie to maybe go to dinner in a way that wasn’t all that friendly. He’s been technically working up to it for almost four years, five if he was being honest, but he _really_ thinks he was getting close to it – he even picked out a place in New York for after the last show, had made a _reservation,_ because even if he didn’t get around to letting Eddie know it was a date, he’d still take him out.

It’s how it goes most of the time.

Too bad _now_ all he can think about is how scared he was at sixteen when he not-quite-accidentally grabbed Eddie’s hand in a movie theatre on the worst double date of the century. He’d held onto Eddie for the rest of the movie, clammy-palmed, and the Addams Family had never been the same… until he totally forgot about it.

“Here you are Mr Kaspbrak,” Hailey blessedly interrupts, handing Eddie his glass with a patented service smile. She turns on Richie, hand briefly at his empty arm rest with a click of nails. “Can I get you anything before take-off, Mr Tozier?”

“All of the bourbon you have, please,” Richie asks, lifting his voice sweetly to match her, hoping it doesn’t come off as mocking, so much as petitionary.

“A double on ice,” Eddie counters, dry, looking back down to his phone with a sharp clear of his throat. “Heavy on the ice.”

“You’re not my real dad,” Richie mutters, slumping and kicking his knee out a little into the aisle.

“Do you really plan on _not_ over drinking tonight?”

Richie exhales heavily, reaching out and snatching the orange slice from Eddie’s drink with a pointed flick of alcohol in his sour face. “That’s social drinking, Signore.”

Eddie gasps like a scandalized Victorian, then promptly erupts: “Did you have to stick your dirty _goddamn_ fingers in my fucking _drink_ , Tozier?!”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “And you’re sure this is it?”
> 
> “It’s got the right name and address, jackass,” Eddie says, pointing aggressively at the GPS console while squeezing the rented clone of his Cadillac into a spot between a pair of budget sedans.
> 
> “Huh,” Richie intones, peering through the windshield with a frown at the sign: Jade of the Orient. It could just be his memory acting up, as it seems to be with every new corner they turn in Derry, but nothing about the building looks like it came before 2005, so it must be new, which seems absolutely insane. “People _move_ here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vague Spoiler: He's not in the beginning of the chapter, but he _is_ at the end.
> 
> Explicit spoilers for The Outsider.

“And you’re _sure_ this is it?”

“It’s got the right name and address, jackass,” Eddie says, pointing aggressively at the GPS console while squeezing the rented clone of his Cadillac into a spot between a pair of budget sedans.

“Huh,” Richie intones, peering through the windshield with a frown at the sign: _Jade of the Orient_. It could just be his memory acting up, as it seems to be with every new corner they turn in Derry, but nothing about the building looks like it came before 2005, so it must be new, which seems absolutely insane. “People _move_ here?”

Eddie cuts the engine, unmoving for a few seconds. “I guess?”

“Bad judgment there,” Richie says, glancing sideways and catching Eddie’s eye; he looks apprehensive, which is both like and unlike him in different decades, and consequently makes Richie want to bail. “What if we just left?”

Eddie’s mouth twists like he’s really thinking about it, rolling the rental fob in his palm. He heaves a sigh when the car’s lights click off, shaking his head and reaching for his seat belt release. “We’re already here.”

Richie grumbles a protest and shoves open the door, then makes the mistake of peeking over the roof while his hand grips the edge of the passenger door. “Oh shit, is that Bev and… Bill? No, too tall… _Ben_? They look amazing – like total Hollywood hot. What happened to me?”

Eddie shoves the door closed with a metallic slam, then looks back and leans forward to talk to Richie over the hood with a sarcastic stage whisper. “You’re literally Hollywood, Rich.”

“Are you blind?” Richie says, closing his own door and gesturing with both hands at Bev and Ben still nattering so cutely on the front steps. “You should start hounding them about agencies like right now, Edsie – I sense I’m about to be kicked into exclusive voice work.”

“Don’t call me that, dickhead,” Eddie says, pointing aggressively with his keys before shoving them into his pocket. “You just want to back to a jog-less existence.”

“I really do,” Richie says, stepping around the car and gesturing small with one hand, putting on a wistful tone; he hopes it does well to hide that standing next to Eddie and his fuck-you beard, approaching Bev with her perfect teased hair and Ben with his amazing arms, makes him feel all of his forty years. “And a face-wash-less, vitamin-less existence. And pizza-more.”

“Too bad,” Eddie says, sidestepping and amiably budging into Richie’s arm with his shoulder. “I’d still make you do all that shit.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Richie says, taking a beat to breathe, thinking of it more like a brooding pause than carefully adapting to the warmth at his side, as Eddie keeps walking _way_ too close. “Just let me be a lump. I want to be one of those happy, ignorant people in Wall-E.”

Bev looks over her shoulder with a start, apparently close enough to hear, and Ben follows suit in the next instant; they both of appear dazed for a beat before starting to smile.

“…Eddie? Richie?” Bev says, eyes darting back and forth, then behind them at the parking lot with a sharp look. “Did you guys come together?”

“It’s a long story,” Richie says, leaning in when they both reach out for a giant group hug; man, they even smell good.

“It’s so good to see you two,” Ben says, a smile stretching across his face in a quiet way that is comfortingly familiar. He reaches out, amusingly over Eddie’s shoulder, to point out another obvious rental in the parking lot. “I think Stan or Bill must already here.”

Eddie abruptly goes still, then exhales hard while sticking his arm out to shove past. “ _Denbrough_.”

“What?” Bev says, understandable bemused, looking back at Richie with a crooked half-smile. “Where’s he going?”

Richie shrugs slightly, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Probably to yell at Bill about turning down a spot on my podcast or something.”

“You have a podcast?” Ben asks, blinking widely and offering a bemused smile.

“As a comedian, I legally have to,” Richie says, keeping his expression somber for a few beats before shrugging again, exhaling a laugh through his nose. “That’s how Eddie made it sound, anyway.”

“Oh,” Ben intones, glancing sideways with an appallingly familiar look to Bev, then focusing back on Richie with a peer. “So are you guys – ”

“He’s my manager,” Richie interrupts loudly, before that little wheel in Ben’s head can turn another full rotation.

Ben gives him a way too empathetic twitch of a smile. “Right.”

Richie can’t really remember being _sure_ that Ben knew he _like-_ liked Eddie, only vaguely being upset that he probably did; they used to mope at the same time in the clubhouse, sometimes, with Richie reading in the hammock and Ben sketching or doodling expansions for their hole in the ground. It was a joint effort of pining; maybe, they’ll get around to doing that again, just for old times sake.

“What’s your podcast about?” Bev asks, her own smile oblivious while she leans forward on her toes.

Richie takes a deep breath. “Well, it’s a light-hearted – ”

“Rich!” Eddie snaps, head poking out the doorway with oddly wild eyes and a mouth that’s a thin and unhappy line. “Come the fuck on.”

Richie blinks back and realizes Eddie must have assumed he would follow him into the restaurant, snorting slightly to himself when he takes a step forward between Ben and Bev. “You think he kept talking to himself?”

“Didn’t he always?” Ben says, falling into step with a shake of his head.

“We used to joke all the time about you two never growing up,” Bev says, exhaling a sigh that could only be described as wistful. “I guess part of that was true.”

“Eddie would assure you he’s very grown up,” Richie says, raising his voice as he pulls open the door with a wide swing to see Eddie actually waiting on the other side with crossed arms. He offers a sweeping gesture for Bev and Ben, ushering them forward while showcasing, “Despite his fun-size exterior.”

Eddie straight out gives the cold shoulder, cruelly giving no indication he’s heard the joke at all when he falls in step. It’s a brutal manager-Eddie move, which Richie _might_ have taken to heart thirty or so hours ago, but now he just makes a point to put his arm on Eddie’s shoulder to emphasize the height difference, affecting a roughly Eastern European accent for effect. “Look at him, my little boy.”

“I’m going to shove a chopstick down your throat,” Eddie promises, staring straight forward into the ornate lobby.

“Hanlon party?” The hostess asks, looking between the four of them and reaching toward with menus with a deliberate slowness.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ben says, offering one of his patented smiles.

Richie lets his arm drop as they’re walked into a little partitioned room, briefly getting distracted by the turned backs of the men at the fish tank, Mike and Bill, he thinks, and _almost_ misses that there’s an actual, real gong just next to him. He stares at it for a beat, a little curious, then sees a mallet so conveniently tied to it by a string that he just has to reach out and wrap his fingers around the handle. “Hey, Eds.”

Eddie dutifully glances backward, then immediately inhales a hissing breath. “Don’t you fucking – ”

Richie hits the gong while staring straight into Eddie’s furious eyes, then looks to the startled figures of Bill and Mike with a grin. “This meeting of the Losers Club has officially begun!”

Eddie sighs somehow viciously, hand briefly across his brow as if he can pretend that he doesn’t know Richie in front of all their own friends.

“Hey guys,” Mike says, a smile breaking across his face and briefly distracting; fuck, did Richie miss that day at school where they gave out the fucking handsome brew? “You all get here at the same time?”

“Sort of,” Eddie says shortly, reaching out and shooing Richie from reaching for the gong a second time.

Bev laughs a little, leaning forward on her toes. “Eddie and Richie came together.”

“You did?” Bill says, a little bemused, then abruptly his brows go up and he glances between Eddie and Richie with the same look that Ben had out in the parking lot.

“Eds is my manager,” Richie explains, again, because hell, he’d thought he had been subtle, but apparently that was a fucking load.

“Oh,” Mike blinks, nodding while absently gesturing for them to take to the table. “Right. That was on LinkedIn.”

“It better fucking be,” Eddie says, stepping further into the room and passing Richie with his focus toward the table. “I’ve been cleaning up Rich’s career for years now.”

“It didn’t need to be _cleaned up_ ,” Richie says, following Eddie and a little unsure if he should sit next to him or take the chair next to Bev, because he hasn’t seen her in thirty years and he sees Eddie pretty much every day, but he… He always sits next to him.

“Uh, yeah, it did; you were over thirty and still making dick jokes,” Eddie says, then points to the chair that Richie has been hovering behind like a rube. “Sit the fuck down.”

Richie tugs the chair from Eddie’s hand and slips down into with a pointed, dramatic slump. “Whatever, Buzzkill McAssbrak. I still make dick jokes.”

“So they haven’t changed,” Bill says, looking to Mike while openly making no effort to really hide the remark behind his lifted hand.

Ben pulls out the chair on the other side of Eddie rather than the one next to Bev, which is predictably martyring of him. “We heard them bickering in the lot before we saw them.”

“You didn’t even know that was us,” Richie says, gesturing dismissively while Eddie sighs heavily next to him.

“Maybe not right away,” Bev says, her grin a little mocking, but friendly, when she looks to Bill and Mike to confirm. “But we also weren’t surprised.”

The waitress arrives in the next minute or so, looking between them, then to Mike, smiling a perfect smile while he tells her to bring plates of various entrees just for the middle. It predictably leads to Eddie making noises about cross-contamination, huffing when Mike brightly tells him he can get a separate item from the kid’s menu, and Richie cracks up because it is _awesome_ having more people around not scared to take the piss out of Eddie.

“You know, Eddie,” Ben says, as the plates of entrees are set onto the giant lazy susan in the middle of the table. “I never thought about you with a beard, but it looks pretty good.”

Richie reins an immediate reflex to look around Eddie with a sneering sort of smile; this is Ben, who’s always been so hung up on Bev that it’s a surprise her name isn’t written across his forehead, not to mention the shit he would so very gently give Richie for pulling that move. He’d probably also tell Eddie about it.

“Thanks,” Eddie says, primly plucking some sesame chicken from the turnstile before anyone else has a chance to touch it. “At least someone here thinks so.”

“That’s not the kind of bad I meant,” Richie says, maybe a little overeager, but he’s pretty sure he cannot conceptualize, let alone _verbalize_ , any idea that Eddie might be the littlest bit ugly. “I meant like a _supervillain_.”

Mike snorts inelegantly into his beer.

“So, how _did_ you become Richie’s manager?” Bev asks, leaning into her palm with a smirking sort of curiosity. “I always thought you’d be a doctor or a nurse, or anything that was more medicine than supervising man-children.”

“Ouch, Bev,” Richie says, taking a deep breath and pressing his hand to his chest. “I prefer comedian.”

Eddie noticeably hesitates, uncertain how to answer or maybe how to censor. It’s still something of a big smoke and mirror show about why he moved out to LA – even to Richie, who’s badgered him about it for the last five years and only gotten various sarcastic lines about living his own _it gets better_ commercial.

“It just sort of happened,” he says, twisting his chopsticks back and forth inside his boring bowl of chicken and rice. “I moved to LA after a – after realizing New York wasn’t where I wanted to be, and a colleague helped me get a job that I wasn’t exactly qualified for, but she said would be similar.” He starts scratching at the back of his head, looking away from the table to the fish tank with a brief grimace. “I’m still not sure what she told them, or if they somehow misread risk analysis as risk management, but either way they stuck me with their biggest problem.”

“More like stuck _me_ with their biggest problem,” Richie says disagrees, downing the rest of his baijiu in one go, then immediately regretting that when the reason it’s for sipping immediately makes itself clear. He clears his throat, setting the glass down solidly onto the table. “Eddie is so far the only person who’s called me an idiot and admitted he had no idea what he was doing in the same breath.”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, but the words lack bite and his mouth twists with something like humor while he picks up a piece of chicken. “Those conversations were days apart.”

The conversation drifts around the table, trading stories of successes and missed opportunities for mocking. He finds out that Bill is married to Audra fucking Phillips and currently shooting in England, yet still flew out, Bev is designing functional fashion and leaving her husband, and that Ben is all about impressing people with building cool shit, which is exactly the same as ever. Richie can appreciate that sort of steadfast conviction to drag a childhood practice into adulthood, as someone who’s currently living off of the practice of making people pay attention to him with dumb jokes.

“ – and it was just really nice to do a library, even if it was for a town almost as small as Derry, but way more open minded. I can’t imagine the head librarian here would allow a – ”

Mike coughs pointedly, raising his brows while taking a sip of his beer.

Ben smiles in that self-deprecating way. “Well?”

“No, I’d hate it. Too loud,” Mike says, his grin growing brightly across his face with a low laugh. “And there’d be a raccoon’s nest in it the first year.”

Bill abruptly, and sort of off-puttingly, looks at Richie, tapping at the table to get his attention and really insistent about it. “Rich, was that you in tha – that, f-f-fuck,” he pauses, staring down at his plate with a furrowed brow, then sighing deeply before looking back up. “I can’t remember the n-name, but it had a surfer raccoon? I got the w-w-weirdest feeling watching that episode.”

“Uh, yep,” Richie says, briefly pitching his voice into the character’s ridiculous cadence. “That was’a all me, Ralf.”

“Right,” Bill says, leaning back in his chair with a thoughtful moue. “Huh. You’ve gotten a l-lot better at voices.”

“Why thank you, darlin’” Richie says, pulling out an old stand-by in the southern belle, pressing his hand to his chest for effect.

Eddie tips his head, half-scoffing, but he doesn’t look annoyed; he seems more pleased than anything, which makes Richie want to ask everyone else if they can see it, too. “You know that thing he used to do where he’d imitate _every_ voice when he was watching something?”

“Oh yeah,” Bev says, eyes glancing to Richie with a droll look.

“He still does that,” Eddie says, snatching a piece of garlic broccoli from Richie’s plate with a quick flick of chopsticks. It’s a little bit like the honor of a wild bird eating seed from a human hand, but with a performative germaphobe. “But now he calls it a _process_.”

“Oh man,” Richie says, opportunity lighting up at the back of his mind; he hardly ever gets to tell Eddie-stories to people who actually care about them. “You’ll never guess where I got _that_ voice from, though.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, gesturing with his glass and actually kicking hard at Richie’s foot under the table; he hasn’t done _that_ in the last five years, so at least Richie isn’t the only one feeling the effects of his teenage self. “Are you ever going to let that one go?”

“Uh, absolutely not,” Richie says, making a point to put his hand up to briefly hide Eddie’s glower from his line of sight. “You dated a cartoon surfer.”

“He what?” Bill says, mouth oddly pinching while his eyes bounce back and forth between Richie and Eddie, then oddly to Bev, who tips her head with a pressed sort of smile back to Richie.

“I was doing this gimmicky Youtube interview on the beach, right?” Richie says, deciding to jump into the story rather than trying to interpret whatever all _that’s_ supposed to mean. “And I look over and Eddie is like talking to this homeless dude – ”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie says, abruptly reminding Richie that while Eddie’s certainly out, he should’ve been the one to say it. He doesn’t look panicked, though, just the usual irritated at Richie bringing up his, objectively even, shitty taste in men. “He wasn’t that bad.”

“So I finish the interview, wander over,” Richie continues, choosing not to mention his absolutely seething jealousy at the sight of another man making Eddie giggle, because he’s got some dignity. “Only to find out Eddie, _apparently_ , went on a few dates with this like actual beach bum – as in more than one, he went on, with this dude covered in sand and sea gunk.”

“Was he wearing an u-ugly shirt?” Bill asks, leaning slightly over the table with a narrowed eye.

“What?” Richie says, taken aback; maybe it’s a writer thing, trying to get all the little details? “I don’t know – it was just like a… Why?”

“No reason,” Bev interjects, a softly curling smile across her face. “So you took his accent?”

“I had to,” Richie says, miming slamming his hand on the table with resolve, but not quiet drunk enough to actually make contact. He puts the Voice on again, though, because he is drunk enough for that. “He was’a like if Shaggy Rogers was, like, also a real California dude, man.”

“Huh,” Bill says, glancing sideways to Eddie with a slow blink. “Why didn’t it w-w-ork out, Eddie?”

Eddie does an odd thing with his eyebrows, seeming to briefly, _honestly_ glare at Bill. “It just didn’t.”

“Right,” Bill says, sotto voce, his brows doing an unspoken thing right back.

“That dude wasn’t even as bad as the band guy, though,” Richie says, a little bit because he hates himself; he likes mocking all of the awful guys, but he kind of really _hates_ the fact that Eddie will date hot garbage, yet not even look in his direction. “Eddie hooked up with a roadie for honeyhoney who was basically just a clumsy scarecrow – ”

Eddie’s voice drops into a vaguely serious threat. “Rich.”

“No, listen,” Richie says, shifting his chair just slightly away in case Eddie decides to try and fulfill the earlier promise with the chopstick. “He spilled half a margarita on my pinball machine, okay, and Eddie still went home with him.”

Bill snorts this time, mid-drink, then covers his face with the heel of his hand.

“That isn’t very buddies, Eddie,” Ben says, mouth settling into a flat, hilariously disappointed line.

“Oh my god,” Eddie snaps, gesturing aggressively with one hand that nearly balls into a fist by the time it gets around the table and sending Richie a lethal glare. “I’d known Rich maybe a fucking month at that point – I didn’t give a shit about his home arcade. I probably wouldn’t do it now, alright. Happy?”

“A little,” Ben says, his mouth twitching upward.

“So you two’ve really had no clue who the other was this whole time?” Mike asks, leaning into the table with a gesture of his beer and a look in his eye that could probably be described as academic.

“No _pe_ ,” Richie says, suddenly irked, and the booze rushing through his veins doesn’t exactly encourage him to keep a lid on it. “Until yesterday. Thanks for that, by the way, you couldn’t have waited like two hours? I totally bombed and threw up – I felt worse at that show than the one I did after I came out. And I _really_ thought _that_ show was the end of my life.”

A pin could drop in the silence, and fuck, teenage Richie has started making klaxon noises in the back of his head. He tries to rationalize that since he’s read a book or two of Bill’s that most of them must have seen one of his specials, right? And they hadn’t seemed to give a shit about Eddie’s exploits. He stares at the empty glass in his hand, knowing he should look up, but that old dread refuses to let him.

He hates Derry.

Eddie starts tugging at the cloth napkin between his hands, like he wishes he could to tear it apart. “My head felt like it was going to explode, seeing Rich on stage while there was this Richie in my head, and I – I – just. Couldn’t.”

“It was shit,” Richie reiterates, clearing his throat and gradually forcing himself to look up, to let go of the glass. “Everyone backstage thought we had – I don’t remember, folie a deux? I guess.”

“I think I passed out,” Ben says, low and sympathetic, hands folding over each other when he looks to Mike, “When you called I… I was on a conference call with a client. I don’t… Shit, I don’t remember if I got back to them. It was… a lot. My heart was pounding right out of my chest.”

“I didn’t really think about…” Mike shakes his head, exhaling a lengthy sigh that’s punctuated by a rub at his forehead with the hand holding his beer. “I guess I’m lucky none of you were driving.”

“It was – It f-felt like…” Bill rolls his lips together, looking from Bev to Mike, brow furrowing tight. “F-f-f –?”

“Fear,” Mike says, avoidant and looking at the table with a stilted nod.

Richie glances sideways to catch Eddie frowning hard, hands balled up in the napkin. He feels a flicker of something in the back of his mind and finds himself staring hard at Eddie’s arm, a wash of static in his ears; it got broken, he remembers, because he fell through the floor in… in the … And there was –

He had seen a fucking –

No, no, _no_. That can’t be real; he’s fucking confusing it with a – a script he read or –

“Pennywise,” Bev says, voice quiet but steady, effectively bringing Richie out of his fugue with a jerk.

“Oh,” Eddie mutters, looking sideways now and making solid, doleful eye contact with Richie. “That fucking clown.”

Richie stares back, the white noise picking back up between his ears at the words ‘oath’, ‘again’, and the fact Mike has a fucking journal of bullshit. It’s not so much static anymore as something he thinks might be an echo of _actual screams_. He looks away with a harsh breath, only to catch Eddie reaching out toward the bowl of fortune cookies; is he actually going to eat one? He fucking hates fortune cookies.

Eddie opens the cookie, then pulls out the slip of paper with a slightly shaky hand. He turns it in Richie’s direction, waving it: _Could_.

Richie furrows his brow, then reaches out and grabs one for himself: _Guess._

“What the fuck, man?” Eddie says, snatching the weird fortune from Richie’s hand and throwing both of theirs on the table in front of Mike.

Mike’s expression freezes, visibly, if quietly, panicked. “I – _I_ didn’t. This must be _It_.”

“Fuck It,” Eddie snaps, leaning forward over the table with an aggressively pointed finger. “Fuck your stupid oath! Why the fuck would you call us back here!?”

The others start opening cookies and throwing their own slips at the paper, Big Bill soon taking upon himself to solve the riddle like the goddamn Batman. The fear bubbles up like it had on stage, except instead of vomit it’s just shouting, hearing Eddie’s voice alongside his and not even very sure of what he’s saying except that it’s loud. It’d be nostalgic as fuck if he weren’t getting so legitimately angry.

Bev throws her fortune in and it’s like a spell is broken, the slip of Stanley staring up at them, then soon: _Guess Stanley Could Not Cut It_.

Richie forces himself to look at the empty chair, prompting a wave of nausea that threatens to return every thing he ate back to the table. He looks away from it, trying to recapture even an ounce of his earlier anger, only to jump about fifty feet when the fortune cookies start rattling; he scoots back slightly, staring hard at the bowl, then about swallows his tongue when one jumps out and starts _hatching_ like a fucking egg.

“What the fuck?!” Eddie shrieks, stumbling up and back out of his chair; his hand is suddenly wrapped around Richie’s wrist, squeezing hard and dragging him into the wall of one of the aquariums.

Richie can’t decide whether to get in front of Eddie like a hero or behind him like a wuss, so he just squeezes up against his side and hopes it’s enough. He nearly falls backward into the glass when a fucking eyeball winds around to stare at him, it and the freaky little wasp baby screaming while shuffling across the wood. “Eddie!”

“I see it!” Eddie responds tightly, but he doesn’t even move, seemingly stuck firmly between fight and flight. A tiny half-winged cookie fuck abruptly rises off the table, diving in their direction. “ _Fuck_!”

Ben dives forward with a muscular arm, batting it away like a shuttlecock.

“My hero,” Richie simpers theatrically, urging Eddie to shuffle a little closer to Ben; he thinks maybe he should feel emasculated, but Christ, _he’s_ not going to try to touch one of these fucking things.

“Zombie!” Ben squeaks, suddenly less gallant and scuttling away from the fish tank.

Richie slowly, reluctantly looks over his shoulder, finding a rotting face staring back and moving its grotesque mouth; he quickly looks back to Eddie, who’s got his furious-and-fearful face dialed up to about a 110. He jumps again when Mike starts smacking the table with a chair, screaming, then feels his jaw drop when the waitress just… _walks_ in and _asks_ if everything is fine.

“Oh yeah,” Richie says, slowly straightening from where he’s been hunched into Eddie’s side. “Do you, uh, uh…” _Not see any of this!_? “Have the check?”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie mutters, his tone near exactly the same as it had been with the gong.

“What was I supposed to say!?” Richie says, a little ticked off this time and shifting further away, glancing briefly to the table to confirm that, oh yeah, every disgusting, impossible thing has conveniently disappeared. “Oh hey, miss, how much freaky shit can you see in here, excluding the display taken straight from Librarians Gone Wild?”

“It’s worse this time,” Mike says, dropping the chair and somewhat senselessly trying to straighten it on its broken leg. “The hold on the town.”

“G-g- _great_ ,” Bill mutters, sweeping a hand through his hair with a full-body sigh.

The waitress comes back and Eddie practically throws his card at her, one hand on his wallet and the other still wrapped _very_ tightly at Richie’s wrist. It’s could almost be that he’s forgotten it was there, if it weren’t for the way his hand periodically goes lax, only to abruptly tense back up again; it’s probably going to bruise, and Richie will treasure that while pretending this is not where he got it.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Bill says, gesturing with his wallet and making a face like he had been really excited to show off his black card.

“He can afford it,” Richie says, pushing up his glasses with his free hand. He keeps his eyes firmly on the exit rather than at the fish tanks, or the table, or the chair that precariously leans as proof of their mass hallucination. “I pay my hos bank.”

“Think before you fucking speak,” Eddie says tiredly, head turning when the waitress approaches with a plastic tray that she holds out in front of him; he stares at it for a beat, then calmly reaches for the pen with his left hand.

Alright, so the wrist thing is permanent. It’s going to make shows and shitting a little weird, but Richie thinks he can work with it.

The others haven’t even seemed to notice, or are being really delicate about it, though they’ve all got a few bigger problems while they all rush from the restaurant. He’s just coasting, half-listening to everyone rationalize the shitstorm of the previous ten minutes while mostly distracting himself with pleasant thoughts of the last time he went to the beach. He’d had to _force_ Eddie come, as usual, and the bastard had proceeded to spend the entire time showing Richie up with his tanned, fit body, so he’d thrown a dead jellyfish at him; it had been one of the best afternoons of his life, also as usual, and totally worth the lecture about stingers.

“Hey, Richie!”

Richie feels immediately jerked out of his hard-won happy thought, turning around to find a literal child standing behind him. He stares for a beat, straightening up, and waits for the kid to turn into a sewer creature that’s crawled straight out from the Kenduskeag.

“The fun’s just beginning,” the kid grins, absolutely terrifying; soon, it’ll be growing teeth. “Right?”

“You’re too fucking young to be watching that shit, kid,” Eddie interrupts briskly, a little shockingly, swiftly making the kid’s face fall. He yanks especially hard on Richie’s arm, forcing him to start moving again, “And don’t put this on Twitter!”

Richie blinks, startled, then realizes it must have been a line from a show. “Sorry,” he mouths over his shoulder, managing to smile weakly when the kid’s expression picks back up into a grin.

“That dumbass cat thing,” Eddie says, as they burst out into the dark night behind everyone else. “Eric Andre.”

“Right, yeah,” Richie says, taking a deep breath and trying to relax. The cool, clean air a little alleviating, but he still feels choked, pressure tight behind his sternum, and he realizes in the next moment that the only thing that could possibly make any of this better is passing the _Now Leaving Derry_ sign. “Eddie,” he says, lowering his voice while trying to steer them toward the car. “ _Edsie_. We should like just _go_.”

“That one’s new,” Ben huffs, shoving his hands into his pockets while they bafflingly pause in the middle of the parking lot.

“Don’t.” Eddie says flatly, though it’s unclear who he’s talking it, as he refuses to be moved even a step. He seems to have fallen in with the rest of them, watching Bev make a call to a number that holds an answer to a question Richie doesn’t even want to _think_ , let alone ask. All of them should be getting in their cars and getting the fuck out.

Bev gets an answer on the call, a voice anxious through the speaker and too high pitched to be Stan, but little else can be made out. “Hello, Mrs Uris? My name is Beverly Marsh, and I – I apologize for calling, but I’m an old friend of your husband – Oh,” Bev pauses, her face losing color while she shifts on her feet, looking over her shoulder while the voice on the phone stammers tiny through the speaker. “He’s – I, I’m so… Oh, he’s okay?”

Richie glances down at his arm when Eddie squeezes it; he wishes he had the balls to just shift his hand and lace their fingers together. He’s pretty sure that, right now, Eddie wouldn’t even read too far into it.

“That’s good,” Bev says, expression trembling with a relieved smile, though there’s an odd perplexity to her tone. “Good, yeah… Let him know. Yeah. Thank you.”

“What h-happened?” Bill asks, taking a step toward Bev with a furrow between his brows.

“Who cares!” Richie says, gesturing wide with his free hand toward the phone. “You heard it – he’s fine and not here, just like we should be!” He looks sideways, swinging his hand and trying to prompt some sort of agreement. “Right, Eds?”

Eddie puffs up while he looks over to Mike, feet squaring and shoulders rolling back into a familiar irritated stance. “You _cannot_ just call us back here with a lie and try to – to – to get us killed! It’s not – what did Ben call it?”

“Buddies,” Ben says, though he seems to regret it, as he immediately crosses his arms with an inward hunch. “Not that I – ”

“It’s not very fucking buddies, Mikey!”

“Wait, just…” Bev interjects, phone swinging at her side while she visibly swallows hard. “Stan’s in the psychiatric ward.”

“ _Stan_?” Richie repeats, trying to imagine anything that might get Stan put in the nuthouse, but all his mind can come up with is further bewilderment. “Our Stan – Stan the Man, Stanley Uris?”

“Yes,” Bev says tightly, lips pressing together while she briefly looks down to the pavement. “He… He attempted to –”

A car turns quick into the lot with a roar of an engine, coming to a jerking stop only a few inches from Bev, who hurriedly stumbles backward to let it pass. They forget the conversation to watch it pull into a spot only a few feet away, reverse lights flickering as it’s put into park and turned off.

Eddie is the first to react, inhaling a derisive breath. “Hey, you fucking asshole,” he shouts, letting go of Richie in his furor, marching up to the door and leaning forward to knock on the window with his knuckles. “What the hell are you thinking?! You almost ran over four people, cockwipe!”

“Eddie, come on,” Ben says, rushing a pair of steps forward in a plucky, utterly misguided move to attempt to stop this pedestrian version of Eddie’s road rage.

Bill quickly looks over to Richie and gestures with his chin, as if he thinks _Richie_ can offer any assistance; has he not remembered anything? The only thing that could ever stop Eddie Kaspbrak on a tear was him running out of energy like an angry toddler, and that has _not_ changed in the last twenty-odd years.

The door opens with a wide swing and a tall, curly-haired man steps out, hands going up with a startlingly recognizable look of impatience on his face. “Take a pill, Eddie.”

Richie takes a sharp breath through his nose.

Eddie hastily backs away, arms scrunching up to cross over his chest; he holds there for a few seconds, briefly peeking over his shoulder to the rest of them before looking back. “Stan?”

Richie feels halfway to diving in for a hug, shock and the vague memory of Stan’s squirmy discomfort with them the only thing holding him back. A quick glance sideways sees everyone in a similar state of in-between, particularly Mike, who’s actually lifted his hands.

“I’m not too late, am I?” Stan says, dropping his hands to shut to the door of the car while looking at the Jade of the Orient in an odd sort of longing. “I’m actually… really hungry.”

“I’ll g-go order you something,” Bill says, stumbling backward into the steps, then pausing while turning around at the top. “What do you w-wa-want?”

Stan rocks slightly on his feet, then gestures smally with both hands. “Chicken?”

“Chicken!” Bill repeats, turning to open the door while an unsteady smile breaks across his face.

“Your wife said…” Bev weakly waves her phone, then drops it like a rock to her side. “You were in the hospital.”

“I – I was, yes,” Stan looks around, promptly drawing attention to a stark bandage on one of his arms with an awkward tug of his sleeve. “I guess I… escaped?”

Eddie gets that tight look on his face; the _‘I’m about to yell, because you did something stupid’_ look. “You didn’t drive here, did you?”

“Not all the way, no,” Stan says, looking sideways and making his own bored face to answer Eddie’s judgment. “Only from Boston. It was the quickest flight.”

“Holy shit,” Richie says, looking at the others and then back to Stan, gesturing wide with both hands back and forth. “ _Why_?”

“I listen to your podcast,” Stan says, completely serious and absolutely non sequitur.

Richie blinks a few times, bemused, and glances to Eddie only to see him shrug. 

“And I remembered that episode about Frankie Peterson, just as I was... When I was in the bath,” Stan says, awkward and suddenly tugging again on his sleeve with a downward glance to his feet. “I remembered how the woman you interviewed said she believed she would die, but that it wasn’t really about her, it was about stopping It. And that without… without _everyone_ there she’s not sure they could have done it.”

“Wait, wait,” Ben says, stepping forward with a glance back and forth between Richie and Stan. “What is he talking about?”

Eddie clears his throat, arms crossing over his middle with a brief lean forward to curl into himself. “Frankie Peterson was one of a series of child murders that _some_ people claim to have been done by a shapeshifting creature,” he says, speaking quickly with a glance sideways that meets Richie’s eyes, dragging his teeth over his lip. “It supposedly fed on the grief of the families it destroyed.”

“That was different,” Richie says, keeping fraught eye contact with Eddie, who eventually breaks it and looks to Stan. “Wasn’t it?”

Stan shrugs ambiguously, sucking in his cheeks, then exhaling hard. “I don’t know, but it got really stuck in my head,” he says, “And suddenly I couldn’t – I couldn’t… let you guys do this alone, even if I feel terrified to even be in the city limits here.”

“Richie,” Bev says, her voice and smile a little tight. “You said it was light-hearted?”

“God damn it,” Eddie says, his disapproval immediate when his focus shifts from Stan to Richie with a glare that’s almost comforting. “I told you to stop saying that.”

“I was going to say it was a light-hearted _take_ on true crime cases suspected to involve supernatural elements,” Richie says, and it’s practically the tagline, so Eddie really needs to get over it being a _little_ inappropriate. “Which now just seems kind of derivative. Considering.”

Ben looks profoundly disappointed this time, brows furrowing, “You have a _comedy podcast_ about dead kids?”

“It’s not always dead kids,” Eddie says, looking away from Richie while his voice swiftly evens out into a very practiced damage control tone. “Most of it is usually pretty goddamned dumb.”

“The most recent episode was about living pterosaurs eating livestock,” Richie adds, taking a breath and putting on the Voice he took on for the episode, “They’re flying – they’re flying!”

A particularly tense beat passes, Ben’s frown deepening and Bev reaching up to scratch at her neck; the tension thickens to become almost suffocating, even Stan, apparent fan, grimacing a little, until Mike abruptly offers out a weak laugh.

“Was that Petrie from Land Before Time?”

“Yes!” Richie says, throwing up his hands and gesturing in victory at Mike before turning back pointedly to Eddie. “Thank you, _Mike_.”

“Fuck you both,” Eddie counters, eyes rolling toward the Jade of the Orient. He had spent about a week up to recording telling Richie that no one was going to get the reference, and here he is with one of their closest friends eating _all_ of the crow.

“I listened to it on the way up,” Stan says evenly, just as Bill bursts out of the restaurant clutching a plastic bag like something is chasing him. Again. “I liked the raptor jokes.”

“You are welcome, Staniel,” Richie says, lifting one hand to press it just over his heart. “Just for you.”

Mike clears his throat, eyes markedly following Bill while he steps through the middle of the group to shove the food at Stan. “Do you guys still want to leave?”

Rich takes a breath, glancing from expectant face to expectant face, then drops his eyes and decides to do what he usually does when he can’t make a hard decision. “I’m going to have to discuss that with my management team.”

Eddie exhales a heavy sigh, arms still crossed while he leans forward on the balls of his feet. “Thanks, Urine, you just had to make an entrance.”

Stan barely shrugs, clearly not paying attention as he tears into a styrofoam container. He starts digging around in it, then pulls out an eggroll. “Is this pork, you think?”

Bill’s shoulders drop, disproportionately devastated. “Probably.”

Stan wanders over to the sidewalk and promptly sits down, shoving the eggroll at Richie, who loses half of it to Bill. He seems to already remember a lot without prompting, mumbling hatred for the town to himself with sour disapproval without quite talking to any of them while they watch him eat. He shifts away with a sidelong glare, but not serious, when Richie reaches out and grabs his shoulder to gently shake.

“You okay, Bev?” Ben says, quiet, but there’s only so much privacy to have standing outside on the same sidewalk with six other people.

“Yeah, of course,” Bev says, looking away from where she’s been unsubtly staring hard at Stan with an odd turn to her mouth, fixing Ben with a wan, if honest smile. “It’s just… been a long day.”

“Cannot wait to pass the fuck out,” Richie says, applying his own translation to the statement.

It turns out that they _all_ made reservations at the Townhouse, except for Stan, who didn’t make any at all. He maybe has the excuse of a clown-induced trauma for his lack of trip planning, but there’s no similar explanation for Eddie volunteering him Richie’s room, who stands awkwardly in the hall while his duffle is thrown out next to his feet.

“What the hell, Eds? I’m too fucking old to sleep on a couch,” Richie says, glancing down the hall and toward the stairs while putting on his best hangdog look, which he’s been assured by multiple animators is fucking great.

“Stop whining,” Eddie says, looking down at his phone while aggressively tapping at the screen. He shoves it in his pocket, smacking at his own room’s door while pulling out the key for the lock. “The bed in my room is a fucking king.”

It is not a king – it doesn’t even look like a _queen_. It definitely doesn’t feel like one when Richie makes a show of jumping into it, feeling too big and hiding his face behind his phone, pretending not to stare while Eddie goes through an apparent checklist of applying night creams and doing distracting stretches that are probably some kind of yoga, all while wearing little black boxer briefs that make his thighs look incredible. Richie tries to distract himself by mentally writing it into a bit, but _manager_ keeps turning into _boyfriend_ , and he feels a little insane about it all when Eddie slips into bed next to him.

The light goes off, but they don’t, arms brushing as Eddie scowls at something on _his_ phone and Richie scrolls through his own twitter, drafting a few tweets about the hotel room, the town, even the Losers, so if they’re about to die, he can send out one last joke. He eventually locks his phone with a click and slumps further into the hard, musty pillows, pretending to be totally cool with the stretch of warmth along his side; he’s technically this close to Eddie all the time, has even slept in the same bed, though being forty rather than fourteen makes a whole hell of lot of difference.

“I almost married my mother’s hospice nurse,” Eddie mutters, breaking the silence out of fucking nowhere.

“Was he hot?” Richie asks, hoping beyond hope he’s not about to get some story about regret and true love because Eddie needs to put distance between them before he can sleep next to him; he'd probably have to go into the bathroom and cry.

Eddie takes a deep breath, silent for a few too many seconds for it to be comfortable. “She wasn’t bad, I guess.”

Richie opens his eyes wide against the wall, then turns to look at the ceiling, feeling an awkward laugh bubble up from his chest. “Shit.”

Eddie’s been out and proud gay for as long as Richie’s known him… well, _as an adult_. He actually encouraged Richie to get the balls to be the same half by just existing, so he can’t really imagine Eddie dating, let alone _marrying_ , anyone but a man… Himself, specifically, which probably makes him a little biased.

“My mom set us up,” Eddie says, effectively flooding Richie’s mind with unwelcome memories of Sonia Kaspbrak. “I think she, uh, she maybe planned for her to up and take her place.”

Richie thinks he deserves an award for not saying any of the three million jokes that immediately jump to mind. “Ok _a_ y?”

“With the meds and the… the fucking _conditions_ ,” Eddie says, his voice pitching high into some mix of resentment and embarrassment, and his words start coming quicker in a rant that could put his angry, little teenage self to shame. “After I left Derry, I just kind of forgot they were fake. My mom picked it back up one day and I didn’t know enough to disagree, you know, so then, fast forward, there I am like thirty-three and my mom dies and my girlfriend I literally never fuck because… _obviously_ , and she knows it too, picks up where she left off with the placebos, because… my mom told her to? I don’t know, but she… probably convinced Myra like she convinced me.”

“Right,” Richie says, a little reluctant to entirely give this Myra the benefit of the doubt, but maybe she was _also_ a hypochondriac? He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about Eddie with a girlfriend because his mommy wanted it, not because it made him happy.

“So I move into her place, even though she wanted to move into mine, but I can’t live in a place my mom fucking died and hers was closer to the office,” Eddie says, throwing an arm over his eyes while he continues to speak at that rapid, nervous cadence. “And, obviously, I switch pharmacies, you know, and… Christ, Richie, finally someone since Greta Keene goes ‘ _hey maybe something is weird with this’_ and gets really insistent I try therapy for my hypochondria rather than… than embracing it. But obviously, I didn’t fucking _know_ my inhaler and six of my eight scripts were goddamn fake.”

Riche inhales slow, reaching up and pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead, then dropping it to run his fingers back through his hair.

“So I decided _fuck_ being told what to do by these _shit_ _slinging_ people who think they know what’s good for me,” Eddie says, gesturing small but violently with his other hand at the ceiling, slightly shifting the mattress. “ _Fuck_ pretending to be some parody of a perfectly average white dude who wears like _goddamn_ khakis and goes to bed at ten, so I broke up with Myra and moved out to LA, got a weird job, and downloaded Grindr.”

Richie stares hard at the ceiling, briefly indulging in an ancient, well-worn fantasy of shoving Sonia Kaspbrak down a flight of stairs. “Did you press charges?”

“No, I just…” Eddie goes quiet a few seconds, his next words dropping to a mutter. “I just had to get out.”

“And you got out and hooked up with all the very worst dudes in LA,” Richie says, the bad joke spilling from his lips before he can quite agree to it. He’s maybe, sort of, a little itchy at all the feelings being thrown around about shit he should have fucking _noticed_. 

Eddie is quiet for a few beats, the peeks over his arm at Richie with a glare. “Not all of them, obviously.”

“Oh, still working your way through them?” Richie asks, gesturing with his hand like he’s rolling out a sheaf of paper.

“Fuck off,” Eddie snaps, exhaling hard, then abruptly making a frustrated noise. “Actually, you know what? _Yeah_. I’ve got a shortlist.”

Richie bites at the inside of his cheek; he knows Eddie is joking, but it still sends an ache beneath his sternum. “None of them are allowed at my place – I need to preserve the sanctity of my arcade.”

Eddie goes quiet a long time, almost long enough he might be falling asleep. “That’s going to be really problematic for you.”

Richie opens his mouth, feeling out a retort at the tip of his tongue, only to realize what Eddie actually said. “What – _why_?”

Eddie snorts slightly, the back of his hand briefly burning Richie’s hip with a gentle whack before he turns onto his side. “Go the fuck to sleep.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Guys, come on,” Bill says, taking Mike's place yelling through the door. “This is p-pretty important.”
> 
> “Fuck off,” Richie says, scrubbing his hands through his hair with a groan. “You know he takes like an hour-long shower.”
> 
> “Shut up,” Eddie says, punctuated by the spray of water onto porcelain.
> 
> “S- _Still_?” Bill says, his irked tone taken straight from middle school. “Tell him to hurry up.”
> 
> “Tell him to shut the fuck up!” Eddie counters, his voice ringing loud enough that Richie just flops back onto the bed. It’s kind of nostalgic, really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Edited the chapter number, because I realized they were... _really_ long, so I halved the next two, and edited the tags.

Richie jerks awake at a smack against the door, an arguably familiar sound, but not particularly so with Eddie Kaspbrak’s arm pressed to his face. At least, not forty-year old Eddie, whose eyes definitely contain murder when they snap open – Richie can’t quite see them, but he knows; it’s a feeling.

“I brought bagels and coffee,” Mike says, voice far too bright and only barely muffled through the door.

“Motherfuck,” Eddie hisses, turning over with a huff like an angry bull and grabbing his phone, then shoving it in Richie’s face. “It’s barely 8! Does he fucking know how often I get to sleep in?!”

“…Bastard?” Richie agrees blankly, a little dazed that Eddie’s arm is now practically curled around his head, his chest is warm and firm, so he’s just going to die here, letting Eddie be distracted from how close they together they were when they – Wait… He grimaces at the screen, then reaches out for his glasses while pushing the phone away. “Tell Marius no.”

“What?” Eddie says, turning the phone around, his mouth curling up in frustration while he unlocks it. He doesn’t move away, _at all_ , starting to text while still solid against Richie and altogether way, way too close to his morning semi. “Why does he keep fucking asking you to guest with that Youtube shit? It’s basically spam at this point – I should block him.”

“Tell him I’m too old,” Richie mumbles, exhaling hard and rolling over, reluctantly pulling away from the fantasy that he could wake up like this every morning, pressed into soft skin while Eddie shuts down people who think Richie wants to guest on a channel where the sixteen year old host is just going to ream him at fighting games. He would add a few other things, of course, none of which include how quickly Eddie has managed to slip into the bathroom for the first shower of the day.

“Guys, come on,” Bill says, taking Mike's place yelling through the door. “This is p-pretty important.”

“Fuck off,” Richie says, scrubbing his hands through his hair with a groan. “You know he takes like an hour-long shower.”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, punctuated by the spray of water onto porcelain.

“S- _Still_?” Bill says, his irked tone taken straight from middle school. “Tell him to hurry up.”

“Tell him to shut the fuck up!” Eddie counters, his voice ringing loud enough that Richie just flops back onto the bed. It’s kind of nostalgic, really.

It actually doesn’t take Eddie nearly that long, but, judging by the muttering when he passes Richie out, it has more to do with the state of the bathroom than his routine. He’s buttoning the sleeve of one of his distractingly well-tailored Italian shirts, pale blue, and wearing a pair of fitted dark jeans; Richie tucks the outfit in the back of his mind, slotting it just under pink polka dot polo with black jeans that he wore once for a summer lunch thing.

God, he’s so _cute_.

“Always dressed for work, huh?” Richie asks, head tilting while watching Eddie throw various blazers on the bed. His brows go up when a bright red bomber comes out, only to watch it be cast to the side; that’s new.

Eddie looks up under his brows. “Uh, yeah, when I’m basically kidnapped from a tour.”

Richie clicks his tongue, stepping a little widely to the bathroom and definitely not taking a deep breath for that hint of inoffensive soap. “I just wear the same thing all the time.”

“No shit?” Eddie says, his voice a little sharp, but an amused twitch lingers at the corner of his mouth. He seems to have found what he wanted in a maroon pullover, ducking his chin while tugging it over his head. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Alright, okay, now that we’re awake,” Mike says, once all of them have gotten down and summarily broken into the Townhouse’s kitchen. He waited like a particularly cruel host to hand out the food until everyone was down – Ben, it turns out, took longer than all of them, so Bill can shut his big mouth – apparently thinking it would be more fair; it probably just made a bigger mess. “I need to show you all something and I know the perfect place to do it.”

“…Cool, Mikey,” Bill says lowly, side-eyeing Richie unsubtly while waiting for the toaster oven.

Richie makes a point to set out his own cream cheese packet _and_ the one he got from Eddie, slathering both sides of his perfectly toasted bagel generously in big sweeps of the plastic knife while staring straight back at Bill. He can remember now that Bill used to get cheesecakes for his birthdays instead of regular ones, and it’s pretty fucking funny how he’s acting like it is a mortal _sin_ that Richie got the extra.

“Sorry, Bill,” Eddie says, tearing off a bite-size piece of his dry, plain bagel with an apologetic grimace. “I forgot it was your favorite before I gave it to him.”

“Uh huh,” Bill mutters, shifting his gaze and settling that flat look from last night on Eddie while pulling out his everything bagel. It’s familiar, _somehow_ , but Richie cannot remember what it means for the life of him.

“Oh, shut up,” Eddie says, tearing off another piece and looking like he’s contemplating throwing it; _he_ definitely remembers what it means. “I did.”

“You want some of this?” Richie asks, licking a line of cream cheese off the surface of his bagel with his best-worst lascivious brow wiggle. “ _Big Bill_.”

Bev snorts suddenly, then bursts into giggles, one hand covering her face while she leans into the table.

“Don’t encourage him, for fucks’ sake.” Eddie says, reaching out and rudely swiping at Richie’s arms to try to stop him very _politely_ eating his bagel. He bodily shudders when Richie sticks his tongue through the hole, shoving him harder with a flat hand on his chest. “Stop being so fucking gross, Richie!”

“I can’t, I just _can’t_ ,” Richie laments, doing his best not to choke on laughter or bagel, dropping his voice while making a show of putting one hand across his forehead and collapsing into his chair. He stares at the fuzzy shape of Eddie through the corner of his glasses, “It’s chronic.”

“So manage it,” Eddie snaps, reaching for his coffee with a harsh exhale.

“Ben!” Mike says, turning bodily away, like he’s hoping that looking away from them will make it stop. “Do you remember where the clubhouse is?”

Ben’s jaw shifts while he slowly swallows, glancing back and forth across the group, then his mouth curls upward with a shrug. “The Barrens?”

Stan shakes his head, picking off pieces of sesame from his napkin with the tip of his finger.

“Where?” Mike says, gesturing more forcefully with both hands.

“Oh, you want me to find it,” Ben says, looking down with a furrowed brow at the table while reaching for his coffee. He nods a beat later, taking a sip, “Yeah, I… probably can.”

“Great,” Mike says, briefly clasping his hands together before dropping them down to his sides with a short clear of his throat, appearing the very picture of the line between apprehensive and excited. “We should take Eddie’s car.”

“Uh, excuse me?” Eddie predictably objects, pinched frown tightening while he glares over his coffee.

“It seats seven,” Mike explains, taking a few steps back away from the bar area with a jerky nod before the sound of the front door is heard thunking closed.

“What is going _on_?” Bev says, leaning back in her chair with a bemused turn to her mouth. She shakes her head in the next moment, standing and making the hopeful decision of taking her half-eaten breakfast on a napkin.

“No food allowed,” Eddie says, harshly gesturing, and he looks pretty close to physically throwing it back onto the bar. He starts patting at his pockets, then rolls his eyes and pushes away from the bar. “Fuck, I left the keys in our room.”

“Not even coffee?” Stan says, one foot off the stool and hand wrapped around his cup.

“No,” Richie says awkwardly around the half a bagel shoved into his mouth; _our room_ , a little elated voice echoes in the back of his head, which he does his best to ignore. “He’s a fucking – ”

“Do not call me that, Richard,” Eddie snaps, glowering down from halfway up the stairs, one hand on the bannister.

Richie rolls his eyes, reaching for his coffee to chug the whole thing down. It’s cheap and bitter, a little too cold, but he’s pretty sure now that he’s going to need it for the rest of the day.

It’s bizarre being in a car with _all_ the Losers, half of who had moved away before graduation, but especially with Eddie driving, who had gotten his license after they’d _all_ forgotten and currently seems a little bereft with no traffic. He does manage to find a way to rage at a pair of passing kids on bikes, which seems to be hilarious to Bev, who reaches out to smack Richie’s shoulder just so he’ll share her smile.

“I can’t believe you rented this,” Stan says, leaning into the window in the far back with a scowl out the window. “Do you have any idea how many emissions this tiny dick tank produces?”

Eddie looks like he cares for Stan’s criticism about killing the planet as much as he does that of the typical LA hipster. “Richie has a Tesla.”

“You don’t cancel each other out,” Stan argues, his expression deepening with fueled irritation.

Richie reaches backward with snapping fingers to get Stan’s attention, leaning slightly against the seat belt while sending a grin backward. “He has one at home, too.”

Stan throws his hands up, shaking his head a few times while looking back out the window.

Bill inhales a loud, judgmental breath, his expression especially funny from where he is stuck in the center between Stan and Ben in the back seat. “Really, Eddie?”

“I’d have thought you understood why better than the rest of us, Big Bill,” Richie says, biting his tongue slightly while peeking back to Eddie, who sends him a dark look before his hand darts out and Richie has to dodge a blunt fist to the thigh. He grins hard as he leans against the window, teenage Richie crowing between his ears; the Eddie of two days ago would have just glared and said something prickly. “Can’t reach?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says evenly, practically formal about it.

“Please tell me you don’t drive like this in LA?” Mike says, his voice a little tight, and it takes a beat to realize that he isn’t talking about anything to do with the car itself.

“Actually, yeah,” Richie says, straightening his glasses with a finger and shrugging while peering down the road. “But everyone else kind of does, too?”

Eddie huffs quietly, tapping at the blinker while smoothly pulling into a rest stop that’s roughly near their old haunt in the Barrens. The Cadillac is going to get _so_ vandalized; a big pink dick may as well already be sprayed on the side.

Richie hesitates as the Losers pile out, glad to be in the front, because it means he can delay opening the door for as long as possible. He stretches his back with a groan when he can’t wait any longer, Stan narrowly staring over his shoulder, and slams the door behind him while peering into the darkened wood between the small huddle of the Losers; the view is arguably innocuous, maybe even quaint, but there may as well be a sign warning about ROUSes for as welcome as he finds the Barrens.

“I think it is…” Ben trails off, taking a step down into the forest with an uncertain glance back and forth, then exhaling hard and pointing vaguely to the left. “That way?”

“This seemed a lot closer on bikes,” Bev says, looking backward down the road before moving to follow down into the wood.

“And it never felt like a h-hike, either,” Bill says, gesturing at the forest floor like it offends him. “The last time I went hiking was… ten years ago in Colorado. It was aw... _awful_ , but my date liked it. That might have been why we b-b-broke up?”

Richie falls in behind while they walk around a thick border of prickly shrubs. “Try going to Joshua Tree like all the time because some asshole thinks the sun kills germs.”

“As if you don’t fucking love that shit,” Eddie says, stepping past Richie and closer to Ben, more at the head of the group. “And we’re on bikes, most of the time, which is like… stupid memory shit, probably. I don’t even remember why we started that.”

Richie makes an effort to shrug hard, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets and briefly raising his brows at a judgmental stump. It had maybe, _maybe,_ been his idea the first time; one of the many instances where he wanted it to be a date up until he couldn’t actually say it was one… which, now that he remembers being a teenager, was _very_ on-brand Richie Tozier dealing with Eddie Kaspbrak of him. It had been pretty shitty, anyway – he vastly underestimated how much it sucked to be unprepared in the desert and both of them kind of had the worst time. The fact Eddie had then said he would go out a second time, with _him_ , had been such a shock he put the whole thing in a set; it makes sense now, at least, remembering they did shit out in the middle of nowhere all the time, shrieking arguments included.

“Me and my wife go birding, like all over the world,” Stan says, head ducked to the ground and nodding with a slow exhale. “We’re going to go to Buenos Aires. It’s… It’s going to be really nice.”

“I can’t imagine going on a hiking date,” Bev says, exhaling a breathy, uncomfortable sort of laugh. “I guess it’s… not enough trust, or something. Maybe one day.”

Richie glances over through the corner of his eye, seeing her staring steadily ahead, and looks away before he can do something stupid, like _ask_. He thinks it might be easier just to hire a hit man.

“You know, Eddie, you didn’t s-say anything last night,” Bill says, clearing his throat, and taking a few quick steps over a greying pile of rotting litter. “About _Richie’s_ boyfriends. When he was t-tr-trashing yours.”

Richie nearly trips at the word _boyfriend_ , chest briefly seizing and a chill washing over him, until he remembers that, oh _yeah_ , he’s not fourteen, or even seventeen. He’s forty and on a comedy tour where a lot of his jokes are basically about all the dick he’s too old to get, with maybe a few thinly veiled references sprinkled in about a guy he’s been, it turns out, ass over tits into since he _was_ that goddamn teenager.

“I don’t know much about them,” Eddie says, sending a narrow-eyed look over his shoulder at Bill while stepping sideways around a fallen tree. He looks back forward, silent a few moments longer, then shrugs, “The only one I ever met was _Cam_.”

Richie rolls his lips together, tempted to make a comment about keeping himself on the down-low or knowing the meaning of a private life, but… Really, that might open himself for questions, probably some from Eddie, and Richie would have to start improvising shit that definitely wouldn’t sound realistic enough for a real solid lie.

“Cam?” Mike prompts, a lilt to his tone that says he noticed the way Eddie said the name.

“The guy Rich was… _seeing_ when I met him,” Eddie says, then abruptly lifts a hand to defensively point at his own chest while his voice raises in pitch. “The fucking asshole called me a controlling little queen to my goddamn face.”

Richie forces a laugh; it makes Eddie look at him, so he also smiles with an amusement he doesn’t quite feel. “I totally forgot about that.”

He totally had not – at the time, he thought he had known Cam longer than Eddie, so it had been sort of hot watching Eddie and Cam fight over his time. It’s embarrassing as fuck now, because Cam looked and acted _a lot_ like Eddie; it’s not exactly a type anymore when he finds out there’s a fucking _template_.

“And then,” Eddie says, looking back over his shoulder with a glance to each member of his captive audience, which is totally a move he’s taken from seeing Richie on stage. “When Rich starts getting more serious about his career, he fucking up and leaves. Like he couldn’t see him improve.”

Richie rolls his eyes and looks down, kicking half-heartedly at a fern. The real truth of it is that Cam broke it off because Richie was, by that point, all about Eddie, and in ways he could never be about Cam. He also was not very subtle about it; a good part of him had been so determined to improve everything – comedy, himself, whatever – because he hoped Eddie would be so grateful that he would kiss him.

…He had not, but he did relax by about a tenth _of a tenth_ of a percent.

“That sucks, Richie,” Bev says, quiet and seeming honestly sympathetic about it.

“It wasn’t really serious,” Richie says, giving her a small smile, then rolls his eyes while pointing forward at Eddie. “I think at this point he feels more strongly about it than I ever did.”

“Stuck up asshole,” Eddie says, gesturing flatly toward some poor tree meant to be a substitute for Cam.

Richie shakes his head slightly, huffing quietly, only to catch Stan from the corner of his eye giving him an unimpressed look. His first reflex is to dramatically mime a cut gesture, but teenage Richie was kind of a dumbass, so instead he takes the more adult path and clears his throat while giving Stan the middle finger behind his back.

“Okay.” Ben takes a breath, circling in front of a tree with a concerned look down at the forest floor. “I think… the entrance is somewhere around here?”

Richie looks back and forth, then gestures wide with his hands in his jacket pockets.

Ben rolls his eyes affably, then starts stomping around again; a crack and then he’s gone, underground with a whump, and for half a second Richie can only think about Eddie, tiny, terrified, and shrieking, on a broken table with his arm snapped in half. He barely remembers what that was even about – the memory coming to him in nightmarish flickers – skidding on his knees, his own small hands on Eddie’s equally small face; _look at me_! 

“Hey, found it!” Ben says, apparently uninjured and sounding delighted, if a little winded, and then a pair of hands wave outside of the hole. “It’s all still here.”

Richie blinks himself out of the memory, a little surprised when everyone actually moves to step down into a hole none of them have seen in twenty years. Well, _most_ everyone – Eddie sticks firmly in place, visibly repulsed, while the others pass him to join Ben.

“It’s just the clubhouse,” Richie says, staring down into the dark for a few seconds before he puts his own foot on the rung. He thinks it’s going to collapse under him right up until he hits the ground underneath, hiding his exhale of relief under a laugh before looking up to Eddie. “You going to lookout?”

Eddie looks around before leaning forward with a groan, stepping toward the ladder with a deeply furrowed brow. “Christ,” he mutters, practically scurrying, sparing a glare at Richie like it’s somehow his fault they’ve all come down here. He opens his mouth, only for his eyes to dart away while he takes a step to the side. “Oh, hey!”

Richie blinks and follows the movement, watching Eddie kneel down and tug a tiny rubber ball from the makeshift floorboards. Oh _yeah_ , the paddle ball he broke the minute he saw it, like a little asshole.

He can also remember Eddie refusing to retrieve the ball, at the time, while shrieking about germs or something. “Aw, Eds, look at you touching dirt.”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, promptly throwing the ball at Richie’s face.

Richie turns on his heel with a laugh, watching everyone else digging into stuff they’d forgotten. The comics are even here, though they’re basically rotting, and Stan has grabbed a coffee can, digging inside with a frown and – _right_ , the shower caps.

“You fucking dork,” Richie says, watching Stan hastily pull one on over his hair.

Stan narrows his eyes, gesturing with the open coffee can. “Are you really going to be forty and still say you’re too cool?”

Richie tips his head for a beat. “Uh… _yep_.”

“Anyone?” Stan says, stretching his arm out further and trying to offer his dumb shower caps.

Richie barks out a laugh when everyone politely smiles and waves it off. “Who knows what kind of plastic chemicals – ? Oh shit, the _hammock_ ,” he says, catching sight of it and completely sidetracked from Stan’s pushy neuroticism. He points it out to Eddie, who’s now got the paddle part of the paddle ball in his hand. “You think this is why you bought one?”

“I mean,” Eddie shrugs, waving the paddle back and forth in gesture. “Maybe?”

“You’ve got a hammock?” Ben says, blinking slowly, his voice dropping while he looks at it with a narrow-eyed look, like he’s having a different conversation. “Like, in your house?”

Eddie shakes his head. “No, and not in mine – ”

“Because it’s not even a house, it’s a shitty-ass apartment,” Richie interjects, waving at a particularly dusty, dark corner of the clubhouse. “This place is probably more livable.”

Eddie scowls the same as he always does when Richie brings up the fact he’s been living in the same very tidy, very sad cell since he moved to LA. “Oh, Mister Fucking Home and Garden over here.”

“It’s 2016, Eds, I prefer Mister Property Brothers,” Richie says, turning his hand flatly in front of himself now, as if underlining the title.

“Mister Snobby Asshole,” Eddie snaps, leaning forward on the balls of his feet and surely about to put his hands on his hips. “Sorry I don’t live in the fucking Hills between you and goddamn Werner Herzog!”

“Guys,” Bill says, but he doesn’t make more of an effort than that single, exasperated word.

“You helped me pick it out!” Richie says, gesturing widely and imagining it’s his yard with the narrow lap pool that he was _talked into_ and the ridiculous hammock out under a palm that Eddie set up as a weird, unexpected house-warming gift now turned latent memory _._ Oh yeah _, and,_ “You keep your stupid broken Jeep in my garage!”

“It’s a Land Rover!” Eddie snaps, raising his hand to point while his mouth presses flat in the way that means he’s getting close to having fun with the argument, but refuses to smile. “And you _know_ it’s not fucking broken.”

“You’re neighbors with Werner Herzog?” Mike interjects, calmly clearing his throat and leaning forward to look between them.

“It’s like the opposite of cool,” Richie says, glancing between Ben and Mike’s excited expressions with an eye roll and a heavy sigh. “I once sat around for like an hour while he and Eddie talked about the fucking Grizzly Man.”

Stan shakes head slowly, looking down at his can with raised brows. “ _Eddie_.”

“It’s a fascinating subject,” Eddie says, speaking low and sternly, as if saying it seriously enough will make it true.

“He was a dumbass, Eds, end of story,” Richie says, wandering over closer to the hammock with a glance down and between its supports. It looks so small now, but it always was, really; it didn’t fit them both even when they acted like it did. “You don’t go live with wild-ass bears while they’re _hungry_ and expect a good time.”

“If you sit in that fucking thing and bring the clubhouse down on top of us, I will end you.”

Richie sighs heavily and makes a point to pout hard while stepping away from the hammock.

“You guys,” Bev says, shaking her head while reaching out to push at Richie’s shoulder. “Never change.”

“Okay, so,” Mike takes a deep breath, pulling off the pack he’s had wrapped around his shoulder and dumping out a liter size thermos and an engraved leather… pyramid? “I need to show you all something.”

Richie takes a step back while Mike steps into the center, glancing around as the others do the same with similar bemusement. The whatever it is leather thing gets put on the ground, in the middle of all of them, and Mike starts to pour what looks like just plain _water_ out from the thermos, unless it’s maybe vodka, but Mike has so far still been Mike, if a little spookier, so that’s pretty unlikely on the whole.

“Okay, I just need each of you to drink this,” Mike says, holding out the thermos cap first to Eddie, which makes sense, because Eddie, but is also hilarious, because _Eddie;_ the literal last person on the planet who would take something strange without demanding the allergy information. “It’s water I infused with a – a root that has some psychotropic properties, so it’ll make it easier to understand what I’m telling you.”

Eddie takes a physical step backward, flinching when his head back hits the beam, then scowling even harder at Mike. “I can’t believe you took us out here to drug us.”

“I promise it’s not that bad,” Mike says, nodding with an easy smile like Eddie is just being fussy. “I know you’ve probably never – ”

“I’ve done _drugs_ ,” Eddie interrupts with a snap, hilariously offended, promptly taking the thermos top and gulping it down.

“More than done them,” Richie says, reaching out for the next offered water himself with a reluctant smirk and throwing it back; if Eddie’s going to do it out of spite, he may as well out of peer pressure. “He made these gluten free carob chip cookies for the Grifters premier – healthiest drugs I’ve ever had.”

“Not technically any healthier,” Eddie says, exhaling heavily and dropping quietly to the ground with a grimace, as if he’s about to get totally blitzed and wants to be ready. “But people like Richie act like it is.”

“Rude, Eds, _rude_ ,” Richie says, following him to the ground with less grace and making an effort to throw a handful of dirt.

“Don’t,” Eddie says, leaning back and lifting one of his hands, but making little more effort to move.

The rest of the Losers follow suit, much to Mike’s visible relief, until they’re all sitting in a circle like a bunch of little kids. The waiting quickly gets to a point where it’s almost painful, so Richie starts scrolling through Twitter, retweeting mostly pictures of turtles on a weird impulse, then moving on to Instagram.

He startles when something touches him and nearly jerks his arm back, then feels his shoulders relax when he sees it’s just Eddie’s fingers sweeping up and down; the sensation lingers, seeping warm into his arm and under his skin. He finds himself zoning in on Eddie’s knuckles for a few seconds, bent in a lazy curl and slim with barely-there knobbiness, just as pretty as the rest of him.

“You’re so hairy, Richie,” Eddie says, soft and amused, but not particularly taunting.

“Kinda like your face,” Richie says, peeking up and catching Eddie’s impossibly deep, dark eyes. He blinks and suddenly the fingertips of his other hand are skating across Eddie’s prickly jaw, curving across the ridge, in a way that has him realize that he’s gotten _very_ stoned, very quick. He’s also finding it difficult to care about that in a way that is very similarly motivated.

Eddie goes still for a few seconds, then laughs, his whole face curling up. “Exactly.”

“Not so pretty, though,” Richie says, reluctantly pulling his hand back to pointedly tug at the hair sticking out from his shirt collar with a scowl. “I should shave everything, like a swimmer.”

“ _No_ ,” Eddie says, eyes getting even darker and expression very serious, as he continues to pet at Richie’s arm. “Do _not_.”

“Hey, can we uh, concentrate?” Mike says, his voice a little tight, clearing his throat slightly while he claps evenly like a total elementary school teacher. “Since you’re all feeling the effects, I don’t want to… to waste time. Yeah.”

“Mikey,” Stan says, so dry that it’s almost a physical thing, scraping unpleasantly like sandpaper. “Are you feeling regret?”

“Oh hey,” Richie says, looking to his other side at Stan and blinking widely in realization. “We never asked _your_ job – you a therapist now, Dr Staniel?”

Stan glowers firmly, bizarrely offended. “I’m an accountant.”

“But you failed pre-calc!” Eddie gasps, leaning over and into Richie, solid and a little staggering, to point accusingly at Stan. “How many people’s taxes have you fucked?”

“It was a D,” Stan argues, ostensibly calm aside for the slow press of his mouth into that irked moue. “I passed.”

“What do you call an accounting student who graduates last in their class?” Richie says, putting on his booming announcer Voice, then reaching out to take hold of the broken paddle and briefly holding out an imaginary mic, then pulling it back in to give the answer. “Stanley Uris, CPA.”

Eddie breaks into pitchy giggles, every individual one sinking into Richie like filling up a prize meter.

Stanley throws his shower cap, which warps for a few seconds into a weird, colorful bursting blob before deflating weakly into the dirt floor. “Shut the fuck up.”

“You cheated off Richie, Eddie,” Bill says, chin flat on his knees and slightly rocking into one of the support beams. “You would’ve failed, too.”

“I did not _fail_!” Stan says, putting both hands flat on the ground next to him, a particular stern expression across his face that means he’s thinking about diving over to flatten Bill’s face into the dirt.

“Come on, guys, please,” Mike says, picking up the leather pyramid from the center of their lopsided circle. “Can we pay attention?”

“Of course, Mike,” Bev says, wrapping her hands around her crossed ankles while nudging her knee against Ben, who’s been solidly staring at his hands for the past few minutes.

Ben takes a deep breath and looks up, then blinks twice slowly, “Oh.”

“Alright,” Mike says, spreading his hands in a way that makes it look like he should have a PowerPoint up with slides. He kneels down, picking up the pyramid with an offering gesture around the circle. “So this is an artifact I got from the Shokopiwah, you know the native tribe that lives – once lived – here, about Pennywise. _It_.”

“Got,” Bill repeats dubiously, frowning slightly while sending a curious look upward. “ _Got_ it?”

“They uh, uh… gave it to me,” Mike says, turning it to show how it has a number of different pictures engraved deep into the leather. He goes still for a few seconds, staring down at it, then abruptly clears his throat with a grimace. “I uh, no, I stole it. After they told me the story. I thought it was important that you all saw it.”

Oh so, the leather thing – the _artifact –_ is like an old, appropriated PowerPoint. He did bring slides.

“That’s… shitty, Mike,” Ben mutters, leaning in closer when Mike passes him with the leather casket. “Is that like a flower – oh, _fuck_.” He starts shoving the artifact back at Mike, looking at it, then jumping again, “What the fuck?”

“It’s going to be a little intense,” Mike says, his pressed mouth expression nowhere near a smile, then promptly launches into an explanation of how the little flower is really a meteor and – shit, _holy shit_.

Richie flinches when an impossible noise abruptly whistles past just somewhere behind him, then nearly chokes on his tongue when it’s joined by a damned awful visual aide of said meteor that removes him completely from the clubhouse just to scream by him. It reminds him of something, almost, but he – shit, the _clown_!?

“Oh god,” Bev gasps, raising one of her hands and then pushing it out in front of her, then bringing it back into her chest. “What’s going on – is it supposed to be like this?”

Mike just keeps talking, turning the casket while going on about It and how it’s been torturing people for literally ever, which is just fucking great. He definitely seems like he rehearsed it, which is almost as insane as the horrifying ghost visions currently trying their best to make them all run screaming, if only Mike hadn’t trapped them in a literal _hole_.

Richie hits the wall trying to escape the approach of some kind of gruesome bird and hastily reaches up to take his glasses off, comforted some by the fact he can no longer see the freaky proto-Pennywise creatures, while wishing he could do something similar with the wailing. It’s not really his sort of nightmare, but it definitely is one; these days, there’s so much to be scared of: clowns and germs and sewers. It didn’t used to be that way, apparently; once, Pennywise had to use primordial things, the sort of things humans couldn’t avoid, then or now – animals, plants, or even just the rain. He made these people fear _nature_.

Not to mention the evil bastard is a goddamned _alien_ , like the worst kind of Clark Kent, if Richie’s getting this straight in all his drugged-up panic. He hopes to any sort of god out there that this It is not some kind of scout for a whole planet of immortal, toothy It fuckers. He does not need to live Mars Attacks with a bunch of – of shapeshifting, people-eating monster fucks.

He stares and stares at the shifting, fuzzy ground between his knees, then dives hurriedly for the fallen coffee can between him and Stan, missing it the first time, then managing to grab it just as his stomach makes to turn over as bad as his head. He’s never been more thankful to have had so little for breakfast, though shit, the coffee hurts like a damned motherfucker.

“You okay?” Eddie says, sounding tense and a little muffled; a glance over makes it apparent, even without the glasses, that he’s got his head buried in his knees.

“Yeah,” Richie croaks, closing the coffee can with a little mental eulogy for the old shower caps inside. He wipes at his mouth, trying to laugh about it. “Just fucking freaked out.”

“Mikey,” Bill says, audibly winded, despite not having moved in nearly twenty minutes. “What the hell?”

“It’s important you know the story,” Mike says, his presentation voice collapsing slightly with apparent, deeply-felt desperation. “To help defeat It. And that requires opening your minds a little.”

“Okay, but,” Ben says, his voice low and a little warping, and Richie risks putting his glasses back on to see him staring at Mike with the sweetheart puppy eyes, not all that different from Eddie’s, but without that latent rage behind them. “Multiple generations of other people couldn’t do this and… And you think _we_ can?”

“We just need to believe _harder_ ,” Mikey says, smiling way too hard and looking a little manic, gesturing to all of them in turn with open hands. “We almost got him last time, guys!”

“How long is this going to last?” Stan asks, both palms pressing hard at his brow while he stares wide-eyed at the dirt. “I don’t… like it.”

“Oh, uh,” Mike says, shoulders falling slightly while he turns his watch up to look at the face. “Maybe another ten minutes or so?”

Bev presses the heels of her hands to her eyes, “ _Mike_.”

“…I’ve got some water, here,” Mike says, kneeling down and reaching back in his bag to pull out a six pack of bottled water. He opens all of the bottles before he hands them out, like he doesn’t trust them to have the coordination, which turns out to be a safe bet, considering Ben almost immediately spills half of it.

“I feel like I’m in the weirdest kindergarten with the _worst_ story time,” Richie says, holding his own water between his hands and waiting for the little ridges on the seal to stop moving in a slow, off-putting circle. He lets his head loll to the side and realizes he can feel his heartbeat against the skin of his neck, then realizes he’s had that thought like every time he gets stoned, which makes him start laughing.

The others don’t seem to like it very much, sending narrow or wide-eyed looks his way. He gestures at his neck, but none of them seem to get it, so he looks to Eddie, only to see him stumbling up from the ground.

“I need to fucking get out of here,” Eddie announces, then promptly disappears with a scamper up the ladder.

“And there he goes,” Richie mutters, raising an eyebrow while looking up at the entrance. He looks over when he hears more shuffling, watching Stan stand too, then shoves up himself with a wince at both the feeling in his knees and the unpleasant popping of his back that echoes around the clubhouse. “Fuck, how long have we been sitting?”

“About an hour and a half,” Mike says, wrapping the leather thing back up, then putting it and the Thermos back into his pack.

“Did not feel that long,” Richie says, reaching out with a few stiff steps and grabbing the ladder in one hand, lifting a foot to the first rung with a slow exhale. “Fuck.”

He shivers all the way down to his toes when he surfaces back out into the forest, scrubbing his hands together. He’s not even particularly cold, really, but something sits chilly across his shoulders and down his back. He looks sideways, lingering next to Eddie, while the other Losers slowly make their way up, all seeming similarly blindsided, except for Mike, who’s got his bag and his drugs, conducting all of this like some kind of librarian-type super soldier on a mission.

“So now,” Mike says, his voice confident, if a little pleading, and nodding as if what he just said made any sort of sense. “ _You_ guys need to find your artifacts.”

“Fuck, Mike,” Richie says, exhaling heavily with a brief slump forward in an exaggerated sulk. “You’re giving us homework? I thought you were a librarian.”

Stan pinches his mouth into a flat moue, crossing, then uncrossing his arms with a noticeable wince. “Our what?”

“Well,” Mike says, gesturing at his pack with a small pat at the outer pocket. “It’s for the casket, sort of – pieces of ourselves from that summer that… that are part of a memory we can sacrifice in the ritual. Like I showed you the Shokopiwah did. It’s a rite, gathering energy from that time to… summon him.”

Richie frowns a little, looking down at the hole and furrowing his brows tight. He probably should’ve listened a little better, but he was _high_ , and freaked out, and it’s been like twenty years since he went to school – he didn’t know it was going to be _reviewed_ later.

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie says, breathing loudly for a few seconds, then belligerently gesturing upward with a flick of his hand. “Fucking fine, _why_ not? We already had a shared goddamn hallucination.”

“Do we l-lo-lose the memory forever?” Bill asks, wetting his lips slightly with a furrow forming across his brow.

Mike looks taken aback for a beat, then slowly shakes his head once. “I don’t know – that… wasn’t mentioned.”

“That’s okay, Mike,” Bev says, only a little sarcastic with her smile.

An itchy, uncomfortable silence falls over them, Richie halfway to blurting something out, except Stan beats him to it, as the first one to step forward. The others immediately fall in beside, and Richie turns around with a lunge that twitches an ache in the back of his thigh, but he is ready as hell to get out of this lame forest.

“Wait,” Mike clears his throat, walking backward until he’s again at head the group, holding out his hands to stop them. “We have to do it _alone_.”

Richie rolls his eyes, scoffing, “What – _why_? We were basically attached at the hip in the summer.”

Mike hums dubiously, one side of his mouth crooking up. “Not _that_ summer, remember?”

“Not rea – ” Richie pauses, eyes going wide, as the memory hits him in a way that’s almost literal. “O _ooh_ shit, yeah, you fucking punched me in the face, Big Bill.”

“What?” Eddie says, expression collapsing, then just as quickly tightening into an all-out scowl while he turns on Bill. “He did _what_?”

“It was like thirty years ago, Eddie,” Bill says, sounding more nonchalant than he looks about it.

Richie glances to Stan, then everyone else, seeing that they’re all bearing similar looks, and realizes that every one of them had _all_ somehow silently agreed not to tell Eddie about it. He hadn’t because Bill was Eddie’s first best friend, not to mention it was fucking embarrassing, but he’s not sure why Bill wouldn’t say anything – unless, just maybe, he _had_ felt a little bit of guilt for almost getting Eddie _killed_ , then immediately demanding they do it all the fuck over again.

“What the fuck?” Eddie says, gesturing wide as Bev coughs a laugh into the back of her hand beside him. “I thought you just had a fight!”

Bill takes a breath, seeming a little like he wants to sink into the foliage. “And we did.”

“He’s got glasses, Bill!” Eddie snaps, gesturing with a tetchy point at Richie’s face.

Richie watches the back and forth while doing his best to keep his mouth shut, actually biting his lip and wishing now that he’d said something back then – this sort of reaction would have fed teenage Richie’s ego for a _year_. It’s sort of making his heart flutter now, actually; does Bill want to reenact it? He’d _totally_ be up to reenacting it, bruises and all, which he’s realizing now might lead to Eddie touching his face with delicate fingers bearing pain creams.

…Oh, those missed opportunities of youth.

 _Although_ , Eddie had just broken his arm and got locked up like Rapunzel, so maybe not.

“It doesn’t actually have to be something not to do with us all,” Mike says loudly, taking an overlarge step between Bill and Eddie to gesture needlessly toward Derry. “Or that you did alone, but you do have to _find it_ alone, remember it, and it has to be personal. I was just – it’s… I don’t know why I mentioned it.”

“Respectfully, fuck that, Mikey,” Richie says, raising his brows while shoving his hands back into his pockets. “Have you never heard of a little thing called the _buddy system_? It’s kind of for this exact situation.”

Eddie raises his chin in agreement. “Making us split up is like a shitty trope out of one of Bill’s books.”

“Hey,” Bill mutters, shifting forward on one foot, though the way he rolls his eyes seems more resigned, than really offended.

“What if we don’t?” Ben says, glancing sideways at Richie, then to Bev, before looking down at something on the ground.

“It doesn’t work and we all die,” Stan says, reaching up and scratching at a smatter of tiny pale spots the edge of his jaw. “Obviously.”

“It’s personal, right?” Bev says, her smile small, as she glances to make odd contact with Bill. “It might be easier alone, even if it’s not a secret.”

The others seem to actually agree with that, or at least Ben and Bill, which isn’t really that much of a surprise, but does make half of them. Richie watches as they all nod at each other, then start to splinter off in different directions. He looks back to Eddie, who rolls his eyes and starts to move in the same direction they started off with, still behind Stan, who has apparently picked up pace and has already nearly disappeared.

Richie walks backward a pace or two ahead of Eddie, hoping there aren’t any roots, then pauses a step in time to shoulder-check him. “You forget the car, Mister Spaghetti?”

Eddie abruptly stops, then exhales hard, turning around on his heel to walk the direction Richie is already facing. “Why couldn’t you have forgotten that forever?”

“I didn’t even really remember it,” Richie admits, grinning wide and taking exaggeratedly long steps to keep up. “It just slipped out.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie slumps in his seat slightly, staring out the window; he takes more of it in than he did on the way out – the worn-down buildings, the renovated garages, the old barn that he once convinced the Losers to go to a party at in freshman year. He had thought Eddie would be the hardest to get to come, but turned out it was Mike, who held onto an aversion to doing anything related to kids their age until junior year. He can’t quite remember how he got Eddie to… Wait, wait.
> 
> He feels his jaw drops slightly at what now feels totally obvious. “Holy shit,” he says, looking over better to glance up and down Eddie in the driver seat. “You spiteful little bastard.”

The Cadillac is miraculously untouched when they get back to it, though Eddie still does a little inspection around the entire thing like he expects to find something jammed in the tailpipe. He leans on the hood before unlocking it, tapping at the hood with his fingers. “Why _did_ Bill punch you?”

“Uh, because I told him to go fuck himself,” Richie says, spreading his hands wide because it feels like that’s probably obvious.

Eddie narrows eyes, “And.”

“ _And_ …” Richie tries to remember the specifics, then shrugs a little while reaching out to tug at the locked door handle like Eddie just hates. “Something about getting over his dead brother, maybe.”

“Christ, Rich,” Eddie says, closing his eyes for a brief, painfully disappointed moment while unlocking the door.

“You almost died!” Richie defends, pulling himself into the Cadillac with a gesture back of his shoulder where the others are probably still ambling back toward town; they probably should’ve asked if any of them ride back, too, but… Too late. “He was being a _total_ dick.”

Eddie shakes his head with a scoff, barely checking his mirrors before pulling out into the road.

Richie slumps in his seat slightly, staring out the window; he takes more of it in than he did on the way out – the worn-down buildings, the renovated garages, the old barn that he once convinced the Losers to go to a party at in freshman year. He had thought Eddie would be the hardest to get to come, but turned out it was Mike, who held onto an aversion to doing anything related to kids their age until junior year. He can’t quite remember how he got Eddie to… Wait, _wait_.

He feels his jaw drops slightly at what now feels totally obvious. “Holy shit,” he says, looking over better to glance up and down Eddie in the driver seat. “You _spiteful_ little bastard.”

Eddie sends him a bemused glance. “What?”

“The big fuck-you cars, the camping in desert, the schlubby guys, the weed – you do all that crazy shit because mommy would hate it!” Richie says, gesturing cyclically with one hand and feeling like he’s finally, _finally_ , unlocked some mystery to why his neurotic little manager who carried wet wipes and ranted about mold just sometimes took a complete left turn out of his neat little path straight into edibles and mountain biking. “Probably even just the _baking_ , too. Just like with that party in freshman year, but like – like growings exponential! She’d blow such a big goddamn gasket that even my soothing touch – ”

The car manages to stay perfectly aligned to the road despite Eddie lunging with a swiping hand. “She is _dead_ , Tozier!”

“Man,” Richie says, laughing lowly while easily dodging the half-hearted jab. “And she would die again if she knew you did all that stuff because of _me_.”

“Not because of you,” Eddie snaps, taking a deep breath and running a hand at the back of his neck before returning it at the wheel with a tight, twisting grip. “I don’t do _anything_ I don’t want to. Just because I didn’t think to do any of that stuff without a suggestion doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”

Richie almost disagrees, because half the time Eddie does have to be persuaded, but... It’s not like _he_ would suggest Eddie hook up with other guys, not to mention he suddenly he remembers one particular, soundly stupid activity that Eddie came up with all on his lonesome. “I forgot about that bouldering shit.”

Eddie snorts quietly, tapping the blinker to turn onto the next street with the Townhouse is visible at the far end. “You need to get over that.”

“’So we heard there was some drama with your manager – could you tell us about that?’” Richie says, putting on a polite journalist Voice, vaguely feminine, then dropping it back to his own interview voice, affable and even, while folding his hands in front of his chest. “‘Oh, well, you see, he splatted like fucking Wiley Coyote.’”

Eddie laughs louder this time, swinging the wheel and parking with one tire rolling briefly on the sidewalk in a way that is definitely spite.

Richie wants to enjoy the laughter the way he usually does, but he can’t stop thinking about how Eddie fell through that floor again; how his arm snapped in half, how he was screaming with pain in his voice for help while a monster tried to eat him. Alright, so _maybe_ Richie hates it because of latent clown trauma, but it’s still a really stupid hobby. “ _Seriously_.”

Eddie shakes his head while tapping off the ignition, pushing open the driver-side door. “Remember when you said I looked like Spiderman,” he says, smugly staring down Richie while shoving the keys into his pocket. “You can’t take that back.”

“I can so,” Richie says, then proceeds to do a drumroll with his hands on the hood of the Cadillac, which he’d never get away with back home, then pulls both back with a flourish. “I take it back.”

“Idiot,” Eddie says, turning around while producing a pair of Ray-Bans from a pocket that quickly turn him into what Richie privately calls cute-sleazy.

Richie takes a few quick strides up beside Eddie to fall in step, seeing the library a few blocks ahead and hoping that it’s not where they’re going. It would be a pretty damned useless place for _him_ to look for his token. He avoided the place like the plague; at least, until somewhere around sixteen, when he realized he could lurk in the stacks reading donated pulp books with missing covers where sometimes two boys kissed.

…Oh. _Huh_.

Well, this should be a quick assignment.

“Rich, you know, I…” Eddie pauses awkwardly, as they step out onto a sidewalk at the edge of a kiddie park, which definitely hadn’t been there when they were kids. “Even though I – I don’t give a single shit about the sacredness of a stupid ritual,” he says, dragging his teeth across his lip. “In the interest of _time_ , why don’t I get mine and you get yours, and we meet back up right after.”

Richie blinks slow, letting the disappointment sink in while briefly staring at a domed jungle gym in the park; he shoves both hands into his pockets with a groan and a lean forward. “What the fuck, Eddie? That’s stupid.”

Eddie exhales an irritated breath. “What _if_ Mike is right? We could ruin the whole fucking thing.”

“Whatever,” Richie mutters, forcing himself to shrug.

“Great,” Eddie says, promptly glancing both ways across the empty road like a good boy before stepping off the sidewalk.

Richie shifts his jaw while he watches Eddie go for a few seconds, idling uneasily, and quickly realizes what old stomping ground lies in the direction Eddie’s headed toward. “What the hell, Spaghetti! You seriously think I’m still banned from the pharmacy?”

“Yes!” Eddie admits over his shoulder, hands balling up at his sides while he briefly glances around again before focusing back on Richie. “I really fucking do – maybe your nose doesn’t take up half your face any more, but I’m not taking that risk!”

Richie clutches at his chest, putting on a low, creaky Voice. “It’s been 84 years…”

“That’s exactly my point!” Eddie says, gesturing with a swipe of his hand before turning back around, shaking his head back and forth at the other side of the street. “That right there!”

Richie lets his arm slump back down to his side, rolling his lip between his teeth. He takes a breath, then exhales hard, glancing up and down the street before deciding to go in the vaguely opposite direction to Eddie; he can loop around and hope they’ve both found them, or at least Eddie has, somewhere on the way.

Derry is small, is the thing – he didn’t used to think of it like that, he thought it was annoying how far away stuff was, especially the other Losers’ houses, or the Capitol, sometimes school when he was tired, but now he knows that even Mike, who lived on a farm with like hundreds of sheep, was barely a twenty-minute bike ride. It’s weird. He sometimes drives an hour through LA traffic just to get tacos, but it barely seems like the huge deal that it was that Bill lived on the opposite side of town as him.

He wanders down a vaguely familiar street, every glance sparking memories of walking or biking, or tripping on a curb, and pauses in front of a faded safety notice on a dilapidated building. He takes a step back and looks up, blinking at the broken sign for the Capitol Theatre, its half-hearted message of _THA_KS FOR TH_ MEMORIES DERR__ , then drops his chin, looking at the newspapered glass and darkened interior of the old arcade lobby.

A _token,_ Mike said… This should work _,_ though he can already hear Eddie jeering at it.

He sticks his hand warily through the broken glass of the door, avoiding the sharp edges, and swallows hard when his feet crunch on shards when he steps inside. It almost looks like they closed it the year he left – the machines are the same machines, the decor the same gaudy pink and blue, though the torn poster for _You’ve Got Mail_ beside the token dispenser betrays the truth.

He digs in his pocket, a little surprised he actually has change, then presses the button, lifting his brows when it actually drops a token into the bottom. Shit, he’s surprised they’re not all gone. He rolls it in his hand, turning around and catching on the old Street Fighter machine, which definitely should have been sold, and takes a step forward, nostalgic, only to immediately take another back suddenly feeling something like the opposite.

Oh, shit. _Right_ , that kid with the pretty blond hair.

Richie must still be a little high because suddenly the arcade is a dull roar around him, the machines all lit up with kids laughing in front of them, and it’s as if he can actually see him – Conner… Conner _Bowers_. He played Street Fighter with him for three days in a row, meeting up, playing for a couple hours; once, they’d even snuck into Weekend at Bernie’s. It had been so… strange, having another friend for a minute, one who _seemed_ to look at him a little different.

He stumbles backward when voices abruptly rise and seem to echo; Bowers showing up with his jeering friends, Conner crowing equal abuse, making him choke on nothing and –

Richie is quickly back on the street and not quite running, but definitely walking fast in the same direction as he had nearly thirty years ago. He tries to blame it on the fact that there’s not many other places to go, when he finds himself walking onto the green at the park with a shudder. He can cut through and –

“Hey, Richie,” A booming voice echoes.

Richie stops hard on his heel, eyes going wide at the ground in front of him. He swallows shallow, then shakes his head, risking a glance backward to see the – _shit_ , this… this _isn’t_ real, it’s just what happened last time. He never should have taken that stupid root shit!

“You want a kiss?” Paul Bunyan asks, then guffaws, swinging up his giant axe with another booming step forward.

“Fuck you, fuck you,” Richie says, stumbling back and reflexively putting his arms over his face, trying and failing not to be pulled into the memory. He’s goddamned forty, a real-life middle-aged adult, and he is not scared of a being murdered by a homophobic statue in the middle of the goddamned park! He came out to the holy trinity of Twitter, Conan, and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee over four years ago, and mostly nothing bad happened, so Pennywise can go fuck himself.

He startles when a guy shoulder checks him, shoving a goddamn flyer in his hand. He scowls and turns it over, only to freeze, staring at his own face with the word _memorial service_ across the top. Oh, this is fucking great, more heckling from Pennywise, except apparently, he’s too old to go missing anymore.

“Gonna be a good one tonight,” the guy says, a laugh at the edge of his tone.

Richie feels a chill down his spine when he looks up from the program, nearly flinching at the image that the guy makes who shoved it in his hands. He’s got his head tilted cocky, a sly smirk across his mouth, and… And cloudy, dead eyes, with half his face torn up from evident road rash.

…Fuck, it’s – It must be the guy who got killed first; the one who got thrown off a fucking bridge.

“Shit,” Richie says, voice pitching into panic, unable to look away as the presumed Adrian Mellon’s rotting face slowly shifts, eyes growing wide and brown, cheekbones sharpening, beard darkening, until it’s Eddie Kaspbrak staring back with flesh peeling from his cheek. “ _Sh_ _it_.”

“Oh, Richie,” It says, voice young and old at the same time, wrinkles smoothing and deepening in discordant ripples. “Are you really still keeping secrets?”

Richie tries to take a breath but it’s barely more than a choke, and he finds himself lurching backward, tripping over his shoes and only barely managing to stay upright in the soft turf. He straightens the program in his hands, looking down, seeing it’s now Eddie –

It grins wider, destroying Eddie’s smile with endless rows of bloody points. “Come on, Trashmouth, don’t you want to say something? Might be your _last chance_.”

“Nope, _no_.” Richie mutters, putting a few more feet between him and – and _It_. He can remember more of Neibolt now, how this isn’t the first time It has taken Eddie’s face, his _voice_ , just to draw him in or freak him out, but knowing that doesn’t make it any less fucking horrific. It arguably makes it more so: he’s putting another goddamn target on Eddie’s already hassled back.

A hooting cackle rings out and Richie recoils, eyes widening when he sees the bastard clown himself perched on the statue.

“You miss me, Richie?”

Richie realizes with a start that the noise of the amphitheater has faded, letting the voice echo eerily through the park; he glances around with a shallow breath, swallowing hard when he sees _everyone_ has turned to stare at Pennywise. He warily looks back to the statue, program crumpling further in his hand, as Mike’s warning about Its stronger hold over the town repeats between his ears.

“I missed _you_ ,” Pennywise says, kicking off the statue and floating down gently, avoiding a deserved end on the ground with a pyramid of balloons. His tone gets whiny and piteous, a frown exaggerated across his face, curving deeper as he gets closer to Richie. “I missed _all_ of you – it’s been _so_ _lonely_ … No one else ever wants to play with the clown.”

Richie peeks over his shoulder again, retreating hesitantly back and to the side, in a direction lacking any creepy, mystified fucks. He just needs to get out of here without drawing too much –

“Won’t you play with me, Richie?” Pennywise pleads, landing gently on the grass and taking a few steps closer, painted face cracking at the seams. “Any game you want – your pick.”

“How about truth or dare?” The doppelgänger croaks in Eddie’s voice, dribbling black blood while grabbing cold and clammy onto Richie’s arm.

“Oh, _fuck_ no,” Richie says, ripping his arm away and deciding to hell with his dignity, turning to run from the park as quickly as he can despite the tightness of his lungs. He actually gets almost all the way to the Townhouse without getting cramp, so fuck Eddie anyway for how the jogging has actually come in useful, only slowing to walk in the case that one of the Losers catches him and asks what the hell happened. It would be the absolute last thing he could take right now.

He pushes open the heavy door, keeping his head down and pulling his phone from his pocket, then shoving it back in when he sees there’s no notifications from Eddie; fuck, they need to get out of here. The others can murder Pennywise without them just fine. Hell, as blindly _believing_ in the whole thing as Mike is, he probably could have done it on his own.

Richie looks up to see Bev and Ben sitting together on the last step, huddled in close, and rolls his eyes hard. “Hey, guys, great reunion,” he mutters, stepping right between their little moment on the stairs and only able to enjoy it a little bit. “But me and Eddie are fucking outtie.”

“Rich?” Bev says, standing up from the steps, fingers brushing at his elbow while he passes by.

Richie stares down at the faded, aged carpet all the way to the door, shoving the key in and pretty sure he almost breaks it when it refuses to turn the first time.

“Hey!” Ben abruptly shouts up the staircase, his footsteps bounding loudly against the creaky wood. “Richie!”

“The only reason I’m even still here is Eddie isn’t back yet,” Richie says, bending down and picking up his duffle from the ground, shoving his clothes from last night and yesterday in, then zipping it back up before slumping onto the bed. He thinks his toothbrush is in the bathroom, but fuck it, he probably needs a new one. “He’s kind of my ride.”

Ben lingers in the doorway, eyes glancing back and forth before he quietly huffs. “So… I should wait until he gets back and talk to him?”

“Hey, hey, _no_ ,” Richie says, trying to rebuff the half-serious question, but it just sounds like even more of a joke. “He has to listen to me. I pay him.”

Ben doesn’t seem phased, idly lining one foot up against the door jamb. “Yeah, you pay him… To tell you what to do.”

“Well, dang, Haystack,” Richie says, leaning back on the bed and clearing his throat, aiming for his next method of defense: pointed discomfort. “Is everything running through your head kinky as fuck?”

Ben blinks a few times. “What?”

“I dunno, man, sounded like – ”

“You _saying_ you kind of get off on Eddie telling you what to do?” Ben says, rocking forward against the door and evidently far less of a prude than he was as a teenager.

Richie stares for a beat, then tips his head slightly, turning one of his hands palm up. “Touché.”

Ben goes silent for a length, probably over a minute, then exhales slowly while offering a strained, if hopeful smile. “We need you – both of you, Richie. Just like Stan said last night.”

Richie glowers back for a pair of beats, then rolls his eyes, looking out the window. “Fine.”

Ben exhales with plain relief, his smile brightening a few measures into honest gratitude. “Thanks, Rich.”

Richie hears the door click closed, listening a few seconds to the footsteps echoing down the creaky hall. He startles slightly at an odd thump, loud and weirdly close to the wall, and wonders for a brief moment if he should go out and check, then decides he doesn’t care and reaches for his phone.

<<’We’re bailing.’ 1:24PM

<<’When are you going to be back’ 1:24PM

He sprawls flat onto his back, closing his eyes for a few seconds with the phone on his chest. He waits for as long as he can, counting to distract himself, then gets impatient and opens the texts again only to see the oscillating ellipses going, and going… _And going_. He sits up on the bed, balancing on one hand and furrowing his brow at what is clearly going to be a multi-paragraph affair.

1:26PM ‘ _Now_.’>>

His brow goes up, because evidently whatever happened to Eddie must have been pretty bad, too, if he can’t even rant it out in a text, then startles when he hears conversation downstairs – unintelligible, mostly, but Bev’s voice definitely just said ‘ – _happened_?’ in an ominously incredulous tone. He turns to the door just as it’s thrown open, then feels his jaw drop slightly at the sight in front of him.

Eddie is absolutely smothered in probable sewer gunk, black and thick, remarkably stinking, not unlike the shit that Pennywise had thrown up all over him when he was thirteen. He stares a few seconds at Richie, frowning hard, then offers a marked, irked shift of his jaw. “Why the fuck do _you_ want to leave?”

“Oh, yeah, uh…” Richie takes a breath, tugging the zipper on his bag an inch back, then forward, trying to blink away, yet again and hopefully forever, the grinning image of Eddie’s zombified doppelgänger. “I just relived that time Paul Bunyan tried to curbstomp me for being gay. You?”

Eddie responds with a long look, frown fixed across his face, then looks down while the expression somehow manages to deepen and become inappropriately comical. “Leper tried to tongue-kiss me.”

Richie raises his brows, rolling his lips together while taking a second glance up and down the frankly nauseating damage; he swallows hard, forcing a weak grin. “Hot?”

“Beep-beep, trashmouth,” Eddie snarls, stomping to the bathroom and slamming the door shut behind him, voice lifting in furor from behind it. “Let’s just _joke_ about the –”

The strangled shriek comes as a particularly unpleasant surprise.

Richie rushes forward, dropping his bag carelessly and pulling open the door to find a bedraggled man that is decidedly _not_ Eddie menacing in front of the clawfoot tub; the man turns toward Richie with a snarl, lurching, and somehow the shower curtain follows him in the movement, tugging right off its rod and dragging across the floor. Richie feels his throat click with a swallow when he sees Eddie is _in_ the tub, a horrifying split of red slicing across his cheek, blood seeping down to his jaw, and entirely too similar to his hallucination in the park.

He blinks hard, trying to shake it off, but everything stays solid and he realizes with a start that this dude really _hurt_ Eddie; he made Eddie _scared_. Richie hasn’t felt this particular mix of panic and horror and actual _rage_ since he was thirteen.

“You see this shit, Richie,” Eddie says, his voice wheezy and his back pressed to the wall behind the tub. “Bowers still has a mullet.”

The man who would be Henry _fucking_ Bowers scoffs, slowly pulling a knife from under the curtain – no, from his _chest_ with way, way too much ease. “Should’ve known you two queers would still be on each other’s dicks.”

Richie feels that shiver of fear up the back of his neck, veering desperately between reaching in to get Eddie and taking a hasty step back to run out the door. “Hey, we – fuck you, we’re reclaiming that.”

Bowers tilts his head unsettlingly slow, as a confused sneer stretches across his face. 

“You know: we’re here, we’re queer…” Richie wishes he could beep, beep himself when the words just keep on coming and coming, sparing a fleeting look to a wide-eyed Eddie; this is just going swell. “Get used to it.”

“ _What_?” Bowers says, shifting back while his grip visibly tightens on the handle of the knife. “The fuck.”

Richie opens his mouth again just as Bowers lunges suddenly, but it’s not at him, it’s at _Eddie_ and he cannot let that happen, no matter how scared he is of the asshole. He’s not quite sure what happens next except that Bowers is suddenly twisted up on the ground in the bathroom floor, a smear of gore on the edge of the sink and Richie hand’s twisted tight into Bowers’ shirt while blood spreads out on the floor under his head.

“Holy shit, Eds,” Richie gasps, stumbling up and off of Bowers, slightly hysterical while staring as a growing stain of red seeps around his shoes. “Holy _fuck_.”

Eddie takes a deep breath, still in the tub. “Rich.”

Richie feels his stomach roll over hard, thankful for the convenient toilet to his left when he almost falls into it as he bends over to retch. He doesn’t think there’s enough antiemetics in the world. “Eds, uh,” he chokes down a hard swallow of water from the sink and flushes the toilet, staring at the swirling water instead of the for real actual fucking dead guy at his feet. “I uh, I think I’m having second thoughts about that hit-man pitch.”

“Too real,” Eddie agrees, suddenly next to him and hastily wiping a washcloth across his own bloody face. His hand briefly touches Richie’s shoulder, hesitant, then wrapping around firm. “We need to get you seriously checked out for this, you – you’ve thrown up like _twice_ today.”

“And it’s only half over,” Richie says, forcing a bright tone while curling over slightly and scratching his hands through his hair. “ _Fuck_.”

The door to their room bursts open a few seconds too late, the lock definitely broken and Ben Hanscom already looking guilty as he peeks into the bathroom. He looks relieved at first, then his eyes drop and go wide, his mouth opening and closing before he looks to Richie. “Hey,” he says, voice laughably pitched toward soprano. “Please tell me I’m imagining this.”

Stan shoves in an instant later to take in the scene, disbelief slightly less obvious, but no less present. He takes a breath, eyes briefly closing, and when he starts to speak, his voice is almost too low to hear. “It’s been _barely_ two hours.”

“You know us,” Richie says tightly, forcing a wide smile and speaking through his teeth. “Real couple of scamps.”

“Could you all shut the fuck up for a minute,” Eddie says tightly, taking a deep breath and marching past Richie through the door, slumping onto the bed. He sits there for a beat, then rocks forward, covering his mouth with the fingers of both hands to badly mute a scream behind closed lips.

Richie watches for a few seconds, eyes fixed on the smear of red winding its way into Eddie’s blue shirt, and feels his gut clenching painfully while his mind stalls against every idea except the fact he’s being totally useless; he needs to do something, and quick, because… _because_ as soon as he makes everything fine for Eddie, Eddie will make everything fine for him. He eases out of the bathroom and sidesteps a bit, lowering his voice while catching Stan’s eye. “You need to let him shower in your room.”

Stan looks at Eddie, gaze dropping to his ruined clothes, then pointedly looks between Bev and Ben before glancing back to Richie with a flat frown. “Why me?”

Richie shrugs inward, offering a pressed smile while gesturing wide with both hands. “Uh, because I’m _paying_ for it, Urine?”

Stan stares steadily back for a few seconds, then rolls his eyes and digs into his pocket, dropping the key into Richie’s hand with a quiet sigh. “I’d say make sure to clean up, but it’s Eddie. So.”

Richie exhales in a long breath, stepping back sideways in front of Eddie. “Eds,” he says, reaching out to tug on his sleeve at the shoulder. “You’re still covered in… leper cum.”

Eddie looks up under his thick brows with a truly mighty glower.

“Up, up, up we go,” Richie says, pretty sure he’s not fooling anyone with the sing-song Voice.

“The first aid kit,” Eddie says wetly, blood across his lips with every syllable and jerking away with a veer toward his stack of luggage.

“We’ll patch that up after you’re clean,” Richie says, looking over Eddie’s head and patting at the shoulder opposite of the blood, because if he gets any on his hand he might really start to freak out, then they’ll both be flipping their shit. “Because germs, baby, germs.”

Eddie scrunches his nose up with a wince, but he doesn’t pull back this time when Richie tugs his shirt to draw him up. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Oh, wait,” Richie says, letting go of Eddie and reluctantly dashing back quick into the bathroom to grab the toiletry bag off the sink. “Almost forgot your little ditty bag.”

“Christ,” Eddie mutters, shoving past Bev in the doorway and awkwardly wiping at the blood, then looking in revulsion at his own hand, which he needs to stop because it… It already looks really, _really_ bad. He almost looks like he did in the – no, _no_ , that wasn’t him.

Eddie darts past Richie once Stan’s door is open, muttering a mile a minute under his breath the entire time and slamming the bathroom door behind him.

Richie throws the key on the end table and sits down with a shaky exhale, shoving his face in his hands, then flinching back with a grimace at the weird ooze at the tips of his fingers. He groans, looking around, and eventually mutters a quiet apology to Stan while wiping it on the foot end of the bedspread. He blinks when he looks to the side, then tilts his head slightly, getting up and looking from one end of the bed to the other – he thinks _Stan’s_ bed is a king.

“Did you change the sheets in the other room when we got here?” He asks loud, because maybe that’s why they didn’t take this one, but –

“ _Obviously_ ,” Eddie says, followed by a slap of wet clothing and water running in the sink

Okay, so… He _lied_ about the size of the other bed.

Richie stares at the bed a beat longer before sinks back down on it. It could be also that Eddie just couldn’t remember the word and said the wrong one, which he does way more than he probably even knows, so it’s not… that weird.

“You killed Bowers,” Eddie says, his voice in a careful tone that Richie has learned to dread; it’s generally reserved for when Richie has really fucked up.

Richie clenches his jaw, looking hard at the floor beneath his feet. “I _know_.”

“That’s so fucked up, Rich,” Eddie says, voice cracking slightly and punctuated by a worrying little giggle at the tail end of his name.

Richie responds with a loud, agonized groan. He slumps until he’s lying on his side across the bed, staring at the door and listening to the spraying water; it’s been barely four hours since the last time, but it feels like four goddamn months. He probably should’ve let Eddie do the first aid kit first; it’s totally going to scar worse and he’ll complain the rest of his life because Richie couldn’t take the sight of him covered in blood.

He can’t believe he let Eddie get stabbed while he was basically in the same room; he had just _let_ that happen – why the fuck didn’t he go to the bathroom, huh? If he had just gotten his damn toothbrush, he might’ve… Well, he clearly _could_ have done something, since he fucking did, even if Bowers had already been – wait, what the fucking shit?

“Did you stab Bowers?!” Richie asks tightly, because he’s suddenly realizing what it meant when Bowers hadn’t exactly been holding the knife in a particularly conventional manner after Eddie got hurt.

Eddie doesn’t answer for a long time, then there’s a conspicuous thunk of a bottle on the bottom of the tub and a muttered curse. “Clearly, it didn’t fucking work.”

Richie reaches out at an empty water glass on the nightstand, using two fingers to nudge, then _push_ , until it falls onto the ground. It doesn’t break. “So we both killed him, then.”

“Whatever you want to tell yourself,” Eddie says, followed by another thud, then the water ceasing with a series of weak drips. “Shit,” he says, joined by the audible pull of a shower curtain. “I don’t have any clothes.”

“I’ll go get some,” Richie says, shoving up from the bed and ignoring a protest from his back. “B-R-B, Spaghedsie.”

“Grow the fuck up,” Eddie says, punctuated by a soft smack on the wall.

Richie winces at the sight of the broken lock on the door to their room, the wood splintered between the jamb and the door where Ben shouldered it open. He hopes it’s not, like, antique or something, because he doesn’t want to pay for shit to do with the place after this disaster. He pushes the door open with the heel of his hand, dodging his own forgotten duffle to go for Eddie’s Samsonite monstrosity. He freezes before kneeling down to peek to the side, hearing water running in the bathroom, only to find it’s just Stan on the ground and ostensibly scrubbing blood off the floor. He also seems to be… alone, in all senses, which is a little alarming.

Richie shifts a step sideways, taking in the sight of a pair of downright adorable _spectacles_ , then feels a grin break across his face when Stan peeks up at him over the frames. “Bet you regret calling me four-eyes now, huh?”

Stan stares back a moment, then shakes his head. “Nope.”

Richie snorts quietly, then leans further into the bathroom, eyes darting back and forth – it’s definitely… missing an entire dead guy. He raises his brows at the sight of pretty much all the towels soaking in the running bathtub, stained pink, then stumbles back out when Stan reaches for one and trying not to think too hard about the currently very visible bandages or Stan’s vague admission last night. He doesn’t… _really_ know what happened, maybe it was a – a _logging_ accident. “What, uh… are you doing? Where did Bowers go?”

“Cleaning up after you, as usual,” Stan says, jabbing the hand towel into a line of grout with a shake of his head. “Mike said he knew where to take… it and I didn’t fucking ask. He took Ben, obviously.”

“Damn,” Richie says, kneeling in front of the bag that Eddie had been digging in this morning. He unzips it and pauses, blinking a couple of times at the sight of nearly folded, striped pajama tucked right on top. He could have sworn that… _Okay_ , obviously, these must be dirty. Eddie’s been on the road over a week now, so he must have run out and – oh, _no_ , there’s the laundry bag wedged in the side. Huh.

“You know,” Stan says, clearing his throat and making Richie turn, watching while he scrubs at a discolored tile. “I learned a new word for you two somewhere over the years.”

Richie feels some semblance of hackles rise, even as the more sensible part of his mind insists Stan wouldn’t just start throwing a series of colorful slurs. He digs deeper into the bag and grabs a pair of black jeans, then flushes like a teenager when his fingers snag on briefs, and eventually wraps it all together in a pale yellow button down; he almost takes the jacket from this morning, but he’s pretty sure Eddie would throw it back in his face.

“Codependent,” Stan says, primly folding the towel in half and continuing to clean the floor.

“Oh, fuck you,” Richie mutters, flipping back through the organized layers of zippers and barriers, then extracting Eddie’s fully stocked, firmly affixed first aid kit from a particularly reinforced corner of the bag.

“Seriously,” Stan says, head turning while he tracks Richie back towards the door. “How old where you when he became your manager? Eight or ten?”

Richie rolls his eyes, heading for the door and awkwardly reaching for the knob with the hand holding the first aid kit. “Thirty-five.”

“Oh,” Stan intones, followed by the sound of the towel being wrung out into the toilet. “Huh. That lines up.”

Rich takes a step back from the door, hand dropping as he watches Stan re-wet the towel in the tub. “With what?”

“Just with everything,” Stan says, kneeling back onto the tile and staring at it for a pair of seconds, then looking back up to Richie while pushing up his glasses by the edge of the frame. “Your whole turnaround a few years ago – less shitty trashmouth, more podcasts, coming out, starting to act and… And that cartoon where you talk to a sentient lorikeet, which I genuinely enjoy.”

Richie stares for a few seconds, then rolls his lips together, crossing his arms with Eddie’s clothes hanging at the end of his fingers. “You’ve been following my career, Stan the Man?”

“I guess?” Stan says, rolling his eyes and looking pained to admit it. “I think I remembered more than you guys, not a lot, but more… I didn’t really know you, but I knew of you. I read Bill’s books and got my wife one of Bev’s bags, too.”

Richie shakes his head with a huff. “When That Eidolic Dark came out last Halloween, me and Eds tore it apart. It wasn’t even bad, I think, it just felt appropriate.”

“I actually followed him on twitter,” Stan says, standing up from the floor and sitting on the tub, wringing the rag between his hands. “Eddie, I mean – I don’t remember why, I just saw him respond to one of your tweets and did.”

“Of course, you have a twitter and followed the most boring man on it,” Richie says, true and tragic – most of Eddie’s tweets are him chewing out companies, Richie, or restaurants, halved with promotions for shows and praise for his other, _lesser_ clients. He even has his professional headshot as his profile, rather than anything fun.

Stan smirks slightly, then gestures with the towel at the clothes in Richie’s hands. “Is that why – ?”

“Rich!” Eddie shouts, his voice resounding through the wall like he’s got his face shoved up against it. “You scatterbrained fuck, did you get distracted?!”

Richie makes a point to put a hand over his heart while he takes an exaggerated stumble back, giving Stan a hurt look. He looks toward the wall, raising his voice, “That’s offensive, Eds!”

“Prove me wrong!” Eddie yells back, his tone so familiar that Richie can perfectly imagine his scrunched face and angry doe eyes. “I know you!”

“He has a point,” Stan says, exhaling a deep, heartfelt sigh and dropping back to the floor with a pointed slap of the wet towel.

Richie gasps theatrically, flinging the door open hard enough that it hits the wall. “Two against one, I can’t believe this.”

Stan rolls his eyes up to glare under his brows. “Really?”

Richie grins back, waving with his fingers from under the first aid kit.

Eddie is on the bed, scowling with a washcloth pressed to his cheek, but most importantly, only wearing a towel when Richie turns into the room. He darts forward the instant Richie is in range, yanking everything from his hands. “This is an _emergency_ , asshole.”

Richie clears his throat, dropping down onto the bed and trying not to stare at the anything presented before him as it disappears behind the door. It’s hardly the first time that he’s seen Eddie almost naked, between LA heat and numerous hotel-stays, it’s just that… He _still_ gets distracted every time, as in: last night with the thighs, this morning with the _arms_ , last week with the shoulders when he was just changing his shirt for a meeting – Richie’s brain seems to pick something at random every time just to make it new again.

“Rich,” Eddie says, opening the door and not even looking, his shirtless figure in front of the mirror while he addresses Richie through it.

It seems this afternoon it’s back muscles, and who could blame him? “Present.”

“You forgot socks,” Eddie says, digging into the first aid kit with the washcloth still held to his face by his shoulder. “And an undershirt.”

Richie sighs and heaves himself off the bed, idly lifting his middle finger to the mirror while he leaves the room.

Stan doesn’t speak this time, just gives Richie a long look that is painfully, _irritatingly_ familiar.

Richie is tempted to throw both the socks and the shirt at Eddie when he gets back, but knows if either of them touched the floor, he would definitely have to go back for more, so he instead holds onto them while sitting on the edge of the tub. He watches Eddie wince and scowl into the mirror, cleaning his cheek with a little squeezy bottle he’d dug out of the bag.

“How deep is it?” Richie asks, straightening his glasses while peering for a brief moment; it’s still bleeding, though thankfully slow enough that it’s no longer running down his jaw.

“All the way through,” Eddie says, opening his mouth with a wince like Richie is seriously going to try and look through his face, which… he might with anyone else, but it’s _Eddie_. He doesn’t want to be retching over a toilet for the third time today.

“And you just pulled it out?” Richie says in disbelief, dropping his eyes and following Eddie’s hand as it reaches into the toiletry bag, pulling out a razor. He goes next for the first aid kit, taking out a white pen-looking thing labeled dermabond that Richie’s more than familiar with it, after a particularly bad, slightly drunken spill off his own pool chair.

“What the fuck was I supposed to do?” Eddie snaps, reaching out and snatching the socks out of Richie’s hand, pulling them on in evident haste, then doing the same with the tank top over over his head. Unfortunately, he barely gives Richie an instant to ogle his framed shoulders before abruptly spitting bright red blood into the sink.

“Is the stuff really going to work?” Richie asks, slumping into the tub further in an excuse not to look, then regretting it when leftover water seeps incredibly uncomfortably all the way down his back. He glares at his knees, hanging off the edge, then decides just to try and ignore it, looking back up at Eddie. “Didn’t _you_ tell me that it… It could kill cells or something?”

“A-fucking-plus for remembering I said that, but do _you_ want to give me stitches?” Eddie says, pulling out and waving a little latched plastic box that clearly contains a set of curved needles. “I refuse to take a single goddamned step into Derry Home Hospital, Rich.”

Richie looks up and away to the vaguely falling ceiling, pretty sure his _fuck no_ is obvious. “There’s got to be a shitty urgent care somewhere.”

“Even better,” Eddie snaps sarcastically, then presses his lips together, leaning in close to the mirror while starting to shave carefully the skin around the cut. “What did you mean when you said that thing about Paul Bunyan?”

“Oh,” Richie says, glancing down for a brief moment just to let his eyes go wide at the wall. “Uh. Uh, I – Today or when we were thirteen?”

Eddie responds with little more than a tight shrug.

Richie can remember acutely never wanting to talk about this ever, especially not with _Eddie_ , but… It’s kind of moot, despite teenage Richie’s dated misgivings making his heart beat double time. “Did you ever meet Bowers’ cousin?”

Eddie turns around this time, brow going up in a silent negative.

“Whatever,” Richie says, nervously looking down while cracking his wrists with tight turns of his hands. “I played Street Fighter with him in the arcade a few times, and I guess that was _super_ gay, because he called me a fairy when Bowers caught us together.”

Eddie immediately scowls, and so hard it looks like he’s trying to break the mirror. “What the fuck.”

“And I ended up freaking the fuck out and running, because I am. One,” Richie continues, forcing a laugh and a shrug, ignoring the tight feeling at the base of his throat and a mortifying prickling behind his eyes that is all teenage Richie. “But thinking about it now, you know, he totally didn’t know that – he probably just said that shit because _Bowers_ said that shit.”

Eddie doesn’t seem particularly willing to accept the excuse. “…Sure.”

Richie gestures in loops a few times over his knees. “ _So_ , I ran to the park and Paul Bunyan tried to kill me because he’s literally a giant representation of toxic New England masculinity.”

“Wow.”

Richie raises his brows and looks up from his hands.

“You’re actually listening in therapy,” Eddie says, his voice a little too lofty.

“Fuck you, Eds,” Richie says, but for some reason the response makes him feel a little better, and he relaxes slightly while throwing one arm across the back of the tub, leaning into it and putting his fist under his chin in interest. “What about your oh-so-amorous leper?”

Eddie is quiet for a few seconds, then shrugs while pinching his fingers at his cheek to hold his actual face together. “It wasn’t like that or anything, but it _also_ wasn’t the first time,” he says, leaning his hip against the sink with a slow exhale through his nose. “When we were kids it was a whole… _immersive_ thing, he – _It_ pretended to be hurting my mom, using her voice to get me into the pharmacy basement.”

Richie blinks a few times. “Old Man Keene just _let_ you go downstairs?”

“Right? But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised he didn’t give a shit,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes, then looking back down to Richie. “Anyway, last time she was actually there, sort of, but this time there was fucking nothing? Except _then_ the leper randomly jumped me and tried to kiss me with this wicked long tentacle tongue.”

Richie hasn’t actually _seen_ the leper, but every time Eddie talked about it when they were kids it was all boils this and deformed that, every shitty thing that Eddie’s mom wanted him to be scared would happen if he like, stepped outside. He lets the story sink in for a few seconds, then raises his brows while leaning forward slightly with a gesture implying secrecy. “So, how did It know you were so into hentai?”

“Christ, fuck you,” Eddie says, kicking at the tub between Richie’s legs with his heel. “It obviously confused our Google history.”

Richie makes a play at jumping back, barking out laughter. “Fuck, Eds, you _really_ need to let me take you to an improv night.”

Eddie turns back to the mirror with a small smirk, reaching into his kit and grabbing a roll of gauze. “You do _not_ want the world to know how much of a hack you really are, Trashmouth, _again_ – you’d lose your following and we’d both be fucked.”

Richie thinks that he would love that, actually; he calls Eddie so often on the podcast that it’s basically a weekly bit for him to _yes, and_ Eddie into calling him a moron, and to actually experience that on a _stage_? He might explode in ecstasy. He may even be arrested for public indecency.

“How did you get all that shit on you, then?” Richie asks, glancing at the pile in the corner that he’s pretty sure is going to be burned.

Eddie turns around to look at them too, but it’s more of a glare. “It threw up on me when I choked it.”

“You choked it?” Richie repeats, trying to be more surprised, but then… It’s Eddie, who evidently also just stabbed Bowers.

“Yeah, I…” Eddie leans back on his heels with a glance down at the gauze in his hands. “I don’t know. It just kind of happened?”

Richie clicks his tongue, patting down at his own chest. “Good to know I’m not the only one who underestimates that Kaspbrak temper.”

“You literally just killed a dude,” Eddie says, holding out the tape down at Richie with a fairly impressive raised brow.

Richie waves that off, slightly theatric, then takes the tape and starts pulling off a piece. “Not because I was _angry_.”

“Oh, so it was an accident?” Eddie says, carefully pressing the gauze to his face, then holding out his hand, which Richie obliges with a few inches. “That does sound more like you.”

Richie ducks his head slightly, biting back another grin while tearing off more tape for each side. Jesus wept, he wants to kiss Eddie Kaspbrak so hard.

“Alright,” Eddie says, once everything is in place, turning a pressed-mouth look on Richie and gesturing to his cheek. “How does it look?”

Richie obediently looks at it for a beat, then exhales hard, feeling really out of place being _this_ guy; he’s supposed to be the other guy. “The fuck are you asking me for, Doctor K?”

“Because I don’t want to go to that fucking hospital,” Eddie says, glaring down while speaking through gritted teeth.

“Then pack that shit and let’s go!” Richie says, swinging a hand up to throw the tape in the bag. He wraps his other around the edge of the tub to prepare an attempt to pull himself up; godd _amn_ , he really should _not_ have gotten in here at all.

“Guys?” Bev asks, voice echoing softly through the door, her tone markedly careful. “Are you decent?”

Eddie glances down to Richie, brow furrowing severely before he clears his throat. “Uh, yeah?”


	5. Chapter 5

The door opens and Bev reveals that her careful tone is matched to a particularly harried expression; Stan just behind her in pressed-mouth discontent. The only one of the Losers not accounted for is Bill, since Richie hopes they wouldn’t have come up _here_ first if Ben or Mike had been arrested for having a body, and they don’t look horrified, he must have run off and done something Bill-ish, like getting all up in arms about one thing or another, rather than getting eaten.

“Bill ran off to the Canal Days,” Bev announces, her hand wrapped tight and white-knuckled around the edge of door.

Richie falls back again in the tub, straightening his glasses with his finger and blinking upward at the troubled pair. “Gross.”

“Why?” Eddie asks, smoothing the medical tape down over his cheek with a furrowed brow.

Stan steps further in the door, glancing at Richie with a cocked brow, then looking over at Bev with a slow flicker of his eyes. “Pennywise left a skateboard with a message on it. Apparently.”

Richie narrows his eyes, peeking between Bev and Stan, then to Eddie. “Did _any_ of us skateboard?”

“Bill said it had to do with the kid from the restaurant, the one who stopped Richie,” Bev explains, a particularly annoyed tension to her expression. “That he had to go… save him.”

“ _What_?” Eddie says, voice pitching with disbelief, then proceeding to gesture flatly in annoyance. “How the hell does he even know it’s about the kid?”

Stan exhales a quiet, familiar noise of frustration. “I guess the kid lives in his old house.”

Richie rolls his eyes to the ceiling, whacking his head a little painfully on the lip of the tub. “What the fuck, Derry?”

“We texted Ben and Mike, already,” Stan says, glancing briefly toward the window, then looking back forward with a jerky nod. “They’re going to try to head him off, first.”

“What the hell are _they_ doing?” Eddie asks, brow furrowing and hands settling on his hips, and oh yeah, he doesn’t know about the whole operation to clean their room; in Richie’s defense, Eddie _was_ half-naked, now in a tiny tank top, and he is, to quote, a scatterbrained fuck.

“Getting rid of a body,” Bev says, tone deceptively pleasant while her head tilts and she sends a significant glance toward Richie.

Richie makes a show of putting his hands up. “My bad, totally forgot I was supposed to just let the bastard kill us.”

Stan methodically crosses his arms, chin lifting while his eyes stare down the bridge of his nose at Richie in the tub. “ _You_ didn’t need to kill _him_.”

“I didn’t mean to!” Richie says, looking a little imploringly to Eddie, because he really doesn’t want to have this dumb conversation until _maybe_ ten years from now in therapy and disguised as a metaphor for his life. “I just shoved him into the sink – how was I supposed to know his skull was basically an egg?”

“Uh,” Eddie says, turning at the waist and looking Richie down in the tub, his judgment echoing Stan. “The fact he was a human?”

“Only _sort of_ ,” Richie counters flatly, forcing the joke while offering his own raised brows back, and though Stan keeps scowling and Bev rolls her eyes, Eddie snorts and relaxes, which is enough for him.

“Right now, though, I think we need to concentrate on Bill,” Bev says, her eyes darting back and forth like she really thinks they’re going to _disagree_ with rescuing Bill from an obvious trap; she presses her lips together, even, visibly a little uncertain, and it’s almost uncomfortable. "Right?"

“Of course,” Richie says, talking a little too loud by the look Eddie sends him, but it’s not exactly a reprimand. “Lead the way, Miss Ringwald.”

“Yeah, just give us a minute,” Eddie says, picking up the yellow shirt from where it’s been folded up on the window sill. He starts buttoning it up quickly, brow furrowed, “You can go down – we’ll take mine again.”

“Thanks, Eds,” Bev says, reaching out and squeezing him on the arm.

Stan lingers a few seconds longer in the doorway. “We got your room cleaned up, but some of the dirty towels are still in the tub.”

“Oh great,” Eddie says flatly, smoothing out the buttons of the shirt before starting to tuck in the tails; he exhales hard at the floor, then shakes his head while looking back up. “Thanks, Stan. Really.”

“No problem,” Stan says, quietly hesitating again, then dropping his head while he steps back and out the door. “Couldn’t really take the sight of it, honestly.”

Eddie raises a brow at the empty doorway, then his expression slowly, visibly falls while his face blanches.

“Yeah,” Richie agrees, taking a deep breath, holding it for a beat, then slowly exhaling at his knees. “Not thinking about it.”

“Has he called her?” Eddie says, reaching for his shoes with a pressed scowl; it looks like he tried to wash them, but there’s still black gunk in the seams. “Like, his wife?”

Richie exhales a painful bark of laughter. “You really think he’d answer if I asked?”

“He might,” Eddie says, briefly confident, then slowly frowning while standing and hooking his dorky phone holster to his jeans. “If he’s changed _a lot_.”

Eddie reaches for his First Aid kit next and packs everything up, soundly fastening it in with the zipper, and tucks it under his arm. He briefly pauses to send an appraising look around the bathroom, then exhales a long breath, taking a step forward out the door.

“Eddie-yeti,” Richie stage whispers, reaching out with one hand while gripping the lip of the tub with his other; the time has come for him to admit defeat.

“Christ, you dumbass,” Eddie says, backing into the bathroom and holding out his empty hand

It takes a minute, but Richie manages to get himself out of the tub with Eddie’s help, straightening his back with a stretch and regretting it immediately at a series of cracks that release all the way up like his spine is a damned ratchet. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, and he actually feels a little looser, but holy shit did that sound bad.

“I’m so old,” he says, twisting back and forth at the hips, wincing when another shorter crack sounds with the movement. “Aren’t the vitamins supposed to help?”

“They can’t perform miracles, dude,” Eddie says, his hands distractingly patting down Richie’s shoulders to his torso with the slightest grimace, but there’s no way to tell if it’s at the dampness from the water or the sound that just echoed through the small room. “You’re going to the chiro the minute we get home.”

“No,” Richie says, reaching up and wrapping his palms around his neck while they step out into Stan’s room, then into the hall. “What if they break my neck?”

“We agreed not to talk about that story,” Eddie hisses, sharing a vexed look while they turn back into their room. He hastily puts the kit back in its place in his open luggage, then starts digging again, the furrows in his face deepening with every passing second. “Fuck, Rich, do you have an extra hoodie? I don’t – shit, I didn’t pack for Maine weather.”

“Uh,” Richie intones blankly, which is apparently some kind of affirmative, because Eddie’s already unzipping Richie’s duffel and dragging out a rolled up black one with a shake of his wrists to unfurl it. “But that's… dirty.”

“Don’t give a shit,” Eddie says, pulling it on with determined shoves of his arms through the sleeves, then zipping it up with a firm nod.

“O _ka_ y,” Richie says, dazedly following Eddie out of the room, a little transfixed at the way the muscle of his forearms flex while he rolls the sleeves to the wrist; the way it sags across his shoulders can’t be fixed, though, nor the way the hem brushes his thighs. “Did, uh… Do you got the keys?”

“ _Shit_ ,” Eddie says, turning away from the staircase and bee-lining back to Stan’s room.

It’s a little nostalgic, parking in a store lot with Canal Days colorful in the distance; at least, until Richie remembers that time Henry Bowers pressed his face a little too close to the gears of a turning Zipper ride when he was eleven, or when Katy Kesper noticed that she’d been sitting next to Eddie in class for nine years and decided they were soulmates, so dragged him onto the Ferris wheel. He’s not sure which feeling was worse, actually, though he’s leaning on the second, and looks over to the driver seat to engage in some old-fashioned bruise pressing as Eddie taps at the ignition to turn off the car.

“Remember Katy, Eds,” Richie asks, leaning hard across the center console while making an exaggerated kissy face. “Your first date?”

Stan scoffs from the back, throwing open the door with an unsubtle mutter.

Eddie pauses with a hand on his seatbelt, eyes up on Richie in a startled blink. He opens his mouth, then closes it, until his brow abruptly furrows while he clicks at the belt. “I don’t consider that my first date.”

Richie feels his expression fall while he blinks in surprise. “You don’t? Who the fuck did you go out with before that?”

Eddie shrugs like it doesn’t matter, turning to hop out of the Cadillac. “Not her.”

“We’ll go in the front,” Bev says, looking at Eddie at Richie while they approach, then nodding at Stan while gesturing towards the main entrance. She turns to point toward the back where it opens into the woods. “You guys go to the side with the bridge, okay? Ben texted me that he and Mike are almost here.”

Eddie nods with a brief glance at Richie, turning on his heel with a short honk of the car lock behind them.

“Seriously,” Richie says, hoping his voice is less of a whine than it sounds to _his_ ears, stepping sideways to nudge his elbow into Eddie’s side. “Was she really not your first date?”

“It wasn’t even a _date_ with her, Richie, it was a hostage situation,” Eddie snaps, immediately piqued, then gesturing cyclically at the entrance to Canal Days in front of them with some significance. “You guys didn’t even fucking help!”

Richie rolls his eyes and exhales hard, rocking his head back and forth for a moment. He knows _now_ that Eddie would feel that way, forced by… _convention_ to accept a date with a girl, but he didn’t have a clue back then – no one did, or, at least, no one said shit to _him_. “We all just thought you liked her, I guess.”

“Fuck off,” Eddie says, with a wincing, aborted bite at his cheek. “What the hell made you think I did?”

“You held her hand, dude,” Richie says, hearing his voice pitch thin and uneven, like he’s that fifteen-year-old kid again pretending to be alright with the development. He can suddenly feel it, the ache beneath his sternum, at the sight of Eddie holding a girl’s hand, of refusing to share ice cream, but buying her one of her own, then smiling at her while she handed tickets to the guy in front of the Ferris wheel.

Richie had stared at their car the entire time, as it went around, pretending he was doing some cool-guy lean on the adjacent kettle corn vendor. He can remember that he didn’t _really_ freak out until later, staring at the darkened ceiling of his room, imagining that Eddie and Katy had done everything from kissing to handjobs in the scant ten minutes of their romantic ride.

He takes a deep breath, looking up from the ground as they approach the bridge, and accidentally catches Eddie looking at him. He isn’t sure what to make of the look in Eddie’s eyes, the way his brow is just slightly furrowed, and manages to raise his own brows back. “What?”

Eddie immediately shakes his head, looking back forward. “I was, just – uh, trying to remember.”

Richie nods slightly, looking away too, and his eyes catch on a crude scrawl of spray paint on the cement: a red heart, _AM_ crookedly set in the center. He feels a jolt straight through to his center, then an icy chill down his back, remembering abruptly that _he_ had once put initials somewhere, too, not so far from here, then realizing these are here for a far, far more somber reason. A reason that makes the teenage Richie flip from pining to dreading, suffering a fleeting thought to drag Eddie back to the car with another aborted notion to run away.

He peeks sideways to Eddie, then down, clearing his throat while focusing on the pavement beneath their feet. “Look. At the bridge.”

Eddie’s steps falter and he goes quiet a few seconds, ultimately exhaling a lengthy breath. “Shit.”

Richie watches his feet for a few more steps, then swallows hard and pulls out his phone on a whim. It’s not too hard to find anyone these days, and between _Derry_ and _Adrian Mellon_ he finds a young man who was enviously, perilously unashamed of himself in a town like Derry. He scrolls down a twitter feed, pausing and feeling his chest tighten at a tweet with a pair of pictures: a ringed middle finger at a prescription bag, an aspirator in the next picture. "He had asthma.”

“Who?” Eddie asks, his hand briefly tapping against Richie’s side.

“Adrian Mellon,” Richie says, swallowing hard, scrolling further down the feed, then swiping to the media tab; he looks… happy. He gestures behind them with a tilt of his head, back toward the bridge. “The guy that got killed here last week.”

Eddie is quiet for a few seconds; a kid screams on a ride some yards away. “Why’re you looking at that?”

“I don’t know,” Richie admits, swiping back to the feed and reading a few more of Adrian’s thoughts; apparently, he had some sort of silent feud against another guy with parking spots at the library. “He’s just… It wasn’t the same, as the others, you know it wasn’t.”

“So you think it was because of me?” Eddie says, his voice tight, not particularly accusing so much as approaching an uncharacteristically _restrained_ upset. “Why It killed a fucking gay asthmatic?”

“ _No_ ,” Richie says, then drops the phone to his side for a quiet few seconds, staring hard at the ground passing beneath his feet. “It wasn’t even really Pennywise, remember?” He mutters, turning his head slightly to glare across the wandering crowd, ignorant and apathetic for it. “It was fucking _Derry_.”

Eddie takes a deep breath, his shoulder briefly pressing against Richie’s in their next steps.

“And you never had asthma,” Richie says, though it is nowhere near really the point.

He tries to actually find Bill for a few minutes, glancing over faces and between groups for a small, harried looking author. He gets a little distracted by how the games are still the same rigged shit, the rides creaky as ever, even after twenty years – he’s briefly tempted to check if the old trick on the ring toss still works, but he would rather not find out how Pennywise would use it to fuck with him.

“He looks… loud,” Eddie says, quiet, and a peek sideways confirms that _he’s_ looking now, but on Instagram, perusing across the many faces of Adrian Mellon. He pauses on one where Adrian is with his boyfriend, tongue out lewdly between his fingers while he has his boy caught in a headlock. “Like, he dresses like you would if you were twenty years younger.”

“I could dress like that now,” Richie says, straightening up and exaggeratedly brushing off a shoulder.

“I don’t think you could pull off jewelry,” Eddie says flatly, tipping his head like he’s actually looking at Richie’s hands, mouth pinching a little in thought. “Yeah. Just look fucking trashy.”

“Literally my middle name these days, Eds Spagheds,” Richie says, then a pair of boots stop in front of them, prompting him to hunch and reluctantly look up.

Mike rubs his hands together nervously, glancing back and forth behind then. “Have you guys seen him yet?”

“Uh,” Richie glances to Eddie, who looks away and back down to the phone with raised brows. “ _No_.”

“Fuck,” Mike says, heartfelt, exhaling a deep breath, then looking down at the phone with a jut of his chin and a beat of vaguely annoyed curiosity. “What are you looking at?”

Eddie turns around the screen with a restrained grimace. “Adrian Mellon.”

Mike looks taken aback, blinking a few times at the phone before quietly clearing his throat with a single nod. “He was a good kid,” he says, with a visible melancholy deep in his eyes. “And some sort of a journalist, I guess. I saw him in the library a lot, writing and looking at scanned microfiche.”

“Like about _Derry_?” Eddie asks, a brow going halfway up his forehead.

Mike is quiet a beat, then glances down with a quiet sigh. “I never actually looked at his blog. I should have.”

“What happened to his boyfriend?” Richie asks, looking down to the phone, seeing both of them smeared in cake frosting, just before Eddie locks it with a click of his thumb and shoves it into his pocket.

Mike shrugs weakly, guilty look lingering. “I don’t know. I – I haven’t seen him?”

“I hope he ran from this shit hole,” Richie says, glaring out across the crowd again and trying not to hate every single one of them; he had been part of them too, once. “Far. Like not just to Portland.”

“Fuck Derry,” Eddie spits, always with fewer misgivings, and loud enough that a good amount of people turn to peer at them curiously, many of them frowning hard.

“Guys!” Bev’s voice interjects, ringing out across the grounds and drawing attention to Ben and her next to a familiar trailer boasting a spinning entrance to carnival-theme horror, which… Fucking _really,_ Bill? “Over here!”

“Damn it,” Richie groans, falling in behind Mike while they make their way through the crowd. “Isn’t that the place with the fucking _mirrors_?”

Eddie barks out a laugh. “You’re going to walk in and every one is going to break.”

Richie pauses on his next step, turning at the ankle as an overwhelming déjà vu prompts him fall back heavy into Eddie to slump in mostly dead weight. He affects a Voice that he likes to call Transatlantic, but is really more bloated Jackie O than anything. “You – you’ve broken my heart, Edward, I can – can no longer…”

“You know I hate this bit!” Eddie protests, nearly a shriek, pushing against Richie’s back and trying to shove him back up; he could literally just take a step back and let Richie fall, but he never seemed to realize it at twelve and hasn’t at forty. “Stop it, you dumbass! Who knows what gross shit is in the dirt here!?”

“Guys, this is a crisis,” Mike says, looking back over his shoulder and clearly feeling pained about it. “Please be adults.”

“Dang,” Richie says, reluctantly straightening back up and looking at Eddie, who looks hilariously shamed. “We just got shushed.”

Eddie reaches out and smacks him in the side with both hands in a pair of swipes. “You _asshole_.”

Bev reaches out to shove at Richie’s shoulder, once he’s in range, a small grin across her mouth. “No self control.”

“I think there’s a service entrance,” Ben says, with a nod and a gesture toward an unsubtly painted door just a few yards down. He glances between all of them, then focuses predictably on Bev, plainly inviting her to tag along with him. “They probably don’t keep it locked.”

“I’ll go in through the exit,” Mike says, promptly taking off at a jog toward the back of the attraction.

“I guess they figure you can slip past the bouncer because you’re the smallest,” Richie says, moving his hand in a slither while sending a grin sideways and pointedly down, pointedly looking below Eddie’s face entirely to focus on his shoulder.

“Shut your fucking hole,” Eddie says, turning around to approach the swirling entrance with a pair of marching steps. He glances down at the attendant’s hand when the kid holds it out for a ticket, then scowls, looking back to their face. “ _Move_ , dickhead.”

The attendant promptly takes a step back with a blink, dropping their hand and allowing Eddie through without a single further objection.

Stan trots up about the same time Richie follows Eddie past the bewildered attendant. “Are you guys serious?” He calls after, his expression somewhere between alarmed and exasperated, and quickly disappearing the further they get into the dark ride. His voice resounds distantly, a few seconds later, “I’m going to the back!”

“Should’ve gone with Mike, too,” Richie mutters to himself, nearly falling on his ass at the end of the revolving tunnel, where it opens into apparent Hell. He swallows hard while watching Eddie and his tiny, fit body dodge between literal bobbing clowns, only being hit once toward the end, and barely even really a clip.

“Are you coming?” Eddie calls, across the veritable chasm, waving as if Richie is somehow going to miss him. “Hurry the fuck up!”

Richie takes a deep breath and moves forward, only to get smacked into the wall almost immediately; he rights himself on the next step, only to get hit again, going immediately to the ground with a groan. He briefly checks his glasses, shoving them firmly up his nose, then tries to stand again, only to drop back down with a flinch when another clown dummy dips too close.

“Richie, you – ” Eddie huffs, then outright succumbs to giggles, bending over at the middle while Richie weakly starts to army crawl on the floor to avoid the clowns. “This is the funniest fucking shit I’ve ever seen you do, you slapstick fuck.”

“Always happy to make you laugh, Eds,” Richie says, trying to be irritated, but pretty sure he just sounds earnest.

The next segment opens into the mirror maze, endlessly and alarmingly bright, giving up little clue to the direction Bill could have taken. It is an uncertain few first turns, the feeling worsening when they reach a crossroads that gives little indication where _they_ might even be, between the seamless ceiling to indiscernible walls, to every fucking thing, making Richie stare at his own unsure face the entire time.

“Shit, was that him?” Eddie exclaims, pointing down one side of the maze, but whatever he saw is gone before Richie can catch it.

“I could go one way and you the other?” Richie says, crossing and uncrossing his arms while gesturing in the available directions. “’In the interest of time’.”

“Are you fucking kidding?” Eddie asks, his brow furrowing tight while he reaches out and grabs Richie’s jacket lapel a leash.

“I mean, it’s an option, Spaghetti,” Richie says, while Eddie bodily points him in the presumed direction of where Bill just disappeared between mirrors. He hits an impossibly clean plexiglas wall only seconds later, Eddie’s hands disappearing with a start at the sad thud. “Ow.”

“Sorry,” Eddie says, outwardly contrite, though there’s a _hint_ of amusement at the end of the apology.

“It’s cool,” Richie mutters weakly, a little affectedly, following when Eddie rushes in yet another direction, slipping through a needlessly wavy hall with some difficulty. He grabs the back of Eddie’s hood when he catches something at the corner of his eye, turning in shock to see a Bill, the kid, and _Pennywise_ straight down a narrower hall just beside them, somehow appearing out of nowhere in the ostensibly translucent maze.

Bill yells something at the kid, then Pennywise, gesturing widely and voice muffled, utterly unintelligible through the distance and layers of walls.

“Is It on the same side as us?” Eddie whispers frantically, brows furrowed heavy while he sends a frantic look at Richie.

“I don’t know!” Richie whispers back, flinching when Pennywise starts to bang Its head against the plexiglas, clearly feeling no pain. He looks around anxiously, hands drawing up in useless fists – shit, just go rescue Bill, huh? More like let’s give Pennywise a goddamn buffet.

Eddie abruptly steps forward, tugging his phone out of his jeans and throwing it at Pennywise, who turns out to definitely be on the same side as them when the phone smacks into the side of Its head, prompting It to turn with a startled snarl. Eddie recoils backward into Richie, but otherwise holds his ground, if muttering hastily under his breath: “ _Shit, shit, shit_.”

Pennywise lurches back and forth between the kid and them, then screams in evident rage, teeth withdrawing and shards of Its face starting to fall and shatter on the ground from where Eddie had hit It, like It’s part of the mirrors. It smacks one more time on the window box and the kid inside before abruptly turning Its back and disappearing between one mirror and another, leaving behind only the cracked plexiglas.

“Damn it,” Eddie exhales, hesitantly stepping forward and bending down to picking up his phone, stiff posture slouching while he turns it over. “My case.”

Richie peeks over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow at a crack in the glass. “You threw that shit hard if it broke your thick-ass defender case.”

Eddie shifts to show Richie the back of the case, flicking with a deep scowl at a jagged crack in the hard plastic cover over the rubber backing. “I can’t believe this shit – I’m getting a refund.”

The kid looks back and forth between Bill and them, visibly panicked, then jumps with an audible squeak when Mike and Stan appear all of a sudden in front of him in the same isolated section of the maze. “Mr Hanlon?”

“Hey there, Dean,” Mike says, his soft voice a little muffled through the plexiglas, while kneeling down and setting a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “You want some help getting out?”

“Please,” Dean squeaks, nodding rapidly and immediately grabbing Mike’s hand in a way kids that age usually act like they’re too old for, holding onto it with a white-knuckled grip.

Mike looks up and glances to Bill with a solid nod, hesitating for the few seconds it takes for Bill to nod back with a shaky smile. He then looks over to Richie and Eddie, gesturing over Bill’s head toward the invisibly hall behind him. “The back is out that way,” he says, turning around with room for Dean to move in front of him. “Try to get over there.”

Richie exhales a long, loud breath, straightening his glasses before looking down to Eddie. “That was some shit, Eds.”

“I can’t believe I did that,” Eddie says faintly, still staring forward with his eyes fixed on the shattered glass.

Richie hums lowly, letting it waver up and down at the end. He gently nudges at Eddie’s back with his knuckles, which is thankfully enough for him to start moving forward, hopefully in the right direction through the maze. He can’t remember shit from the last time he was in here, except that it felt taller, and he wouldn’t be surprised if the bastards changed it every year.

He hastily looks around when Eddie’s breathing abruptly gets loud and quick, furrowing his brow at himself in the mirrors, then feels like an idiot when he ultimately catches a familiar pinched, panicked expression across Eddie’s gasping face. He reaches out, putting both hands on Eddie’s shoulders like he used to always do, like he’s sometimes done even in the past five years; it’s different now, those worlds colliding – when they were kids, it was just _Eddie freaks out a lot,_ but now Richie’s old and has enough of his own ugly issues to know it’s that Eddie has so much anxiety it tries to make his lungs explode.

“Hey, man,” Richie says, softly, shifting his hands to knead his thumbs into Eddie’s shoulders to try and give him something solid. “Eddie?”

“What if that fuck had gotten Bill?” Eddie says, his voice barely a squeak, hunching forward while reaching up and covering his face with both hands. “What if _doing that_ had made It go after us?! I could’ve gotten all of us killed!”

“You didn’t, though, it… It worked,” Richie says, hesitating a beat before shifting in closer, until Eddie’s back is pressed to his front, the rapid expansion of his chest unmistakable. He keeps an eye on the miserable reflection of Eddie, speaking lowly, “Eds, can you breathe with me?”

Eddie slowly lists backward, his hands sliding up his face and into his hair while his breathing calms, gradually syncing with Richie’s, until he’s staring silently at the ground. He wipes the heel of one hand across his eyes, red and damp, then his posture relaxes further with a heavy, bursting sigh.

“You good?” Richie asks, swallowing hard, feeling somewhere between jumping away and literally sweeping Eddie off his feet. He’s pretty sure he can’t even blame teenage Richie for the problem – it’s an all-ages Richie issue.

Eddie nods stiltedly, running his hands through his hair one last time before letting them drop to his sides. “I just – _yeah_ , fuck.”

Richie takes a few seconds to appreciate, maybe a little inappropriately, the feel of Eddie solid against him, then pulls away with a final squeeze of his shoulders. “Come on, we got to get out of here – it feels like I’m in a big joke about my ego.”

Eddie rolls his glassy eyes to peer at Richie from under his brows. “If only it was just a joke.”

Richie clasps at his heart with both hands crossed over each other, gasping, and is elated at just the sparest laughter he gets when Eddie looks away, badly hiding his grin among the mirrors.

“Are we _lost_?” Eddie says, back to his irked normal some seconds later, when they turn yet another corner into _another_ bank of unsettling mirrors.

“Wouldn’t it be shitty if this was all in our heads?” Richie whispers, peering briefly at his own reflection with a brow waggle, then switching to the other side with a perfect perspective to see Eddie’s unamused scowl. “And we were just like slowly being eaten like that episode of X-Files.”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, turning so his hand makes solid contact with Richie’s side. “We saw – ”

“Hey guys!” Ben yells, scaring the shit out of them while waving on the other end of a long hall, which is hopefully not just another godawful mirror angle. “Straight down!”

“Thank fucking christ, Haystack,” Richie shouts back, spreading his arms wide and shoving past Eddie, following the direction with a little skip and kind of surprised that he doesn’t trip. “We were about to settle here and start a family.”

Eddie snorts through his nose, thumping again on Richie’s side.

Ben leads right and left, then right again, until they’re all bursting out of a door blessedly marked Exit in bubbly lights. He points to the side, where Bill and Mike are talking to the greasy teenager in a red jacket and an apparent supervisor, then toward where Bev and Stan are standing huddled with Dean next to a temporary bench. “We’re kind of just… sticking here for a second?”

“Cool,” Richie says, glancing to Eddie, who shrugs, then turns on his heel toward Stan and Bev. He doesn’t really _feel_ like being part of the explanation of how or why they broke into a shitty horror attraction to drag out a kid, especially when Bill looks eager as ever to be the one to spin that yarn. “Cool, _cool_.”

He sits down on the bench with tug on Eddie’s slack, fallen sleeve, only to receive a short denial in a frown. It’s not a surprising response, with Eddie looking like he’s about to start vibrating, so he takes it with a sigh and a slump further into the plastic.

“You’re Richie Tozier,” Dean says quietly, as if it’s some kind of secret, while looking over with a wide look.

“Oh, yeah,” Richie says, shrugging and pushing up his glasses, then feeling a little awkward when Dean proceeds to shuffle down onto the bench next to him. “I guess this is a kind of shitty way to meet a celebrity, huh?”

Dean shakes his head, staring upward at Richie from under his hair. “I already met you.”

“Shit, yeah,” Richie says, nodding awkwardly, then pointedly looking up at Eddie with a nod sideways toward Dean. “Hey, apologize for yelling at him.”

“I didn’t yell at him,” Eddie says, though his arms fold up defensively and he tugs at the loose sleeves of the hoodie, mouth pinching for a beat before he does focus on the kid. “What’s your full name – where are your parents?”

“Dean Kolisky,” Dean says, looking down at his knees for a few seconds before looking up with a shrug, his voice going a little forcibly cheerful when he answers the next question. “And my parents are uh, they’re in Connecticut.”

“Fucking Derry,” Eddie says, heartfelt, stomping off toward where Bill and Mike are at the other side of the trailer with the gathering crowd of festival… _volunteers_?

Dean hunches slightly, quiet a few beats while his hands clasp around his legs. He gradually turns to peek over to Richie again, plainly intrigued, “Do you live in California?”

Richie draws out his response with a deep breath, eyeing Dean critically, then reluctantly holds out his pinky and thumb in a shaka. “Twenty years. I’m from here, though.”

“Really?” Dean says, his eyes narrowing with skepticism.

“Unfortunately,” Richie says flatly, dropping his hand with a grimace.

“Wow,” Dean says, rocking back and forth on the bench, then nodding in an odd decisive manner. “Do you have a pool?”

“I do,” Richie says, glancing upward to see Stan and Bev staring back down at him; great, _expectations_. 

“Cool,” Dean says, pausing for another moment, clearly thinking, until his eyes go a little wide. “What about a palm tree?”

Richie leans back slightly in the bench. “That too. And a lemon tree.”

“A sports car?”

“Yep,” Richie says, though it’s kind of a lie – _he_ counts it, despite what Eddie says, since it’s fast and red, and way, way too much money.

“Are you married to a super model?” Dean asks, leaning closer and eyes getting bigger; it’s becoming pretty obvious that he’s trying to live vicariously.

“… _No_ p _e_ ,” Richie says, crushing Dean’s dreams while taking a deep breath and swallowing a reflexive, dated joke about Chippendales and cock socks, instead offering a small shrug. “But I have a guy who keeps his dumb project car in my garage.”

“Cool,” Dean says, seeming unfazed and brow furrowing in evident thought, then looking back to Richie with another nod. “My mom complains when my dad does that, too.”

Bev snorts into the back of her hand, looking over the kid’s head at Richie with a pair of raised eyebrows.

“It’s a 1987 Buick Grand National,” Dean says, syllables slightly clipped and careful, as if reciting it. “It’s blue.”

“Eddie’s is…” Richie wavers a beat, catching a familiar harried gait at the corner of his eye. “Some kind of red Jeep.”

“ _Land Rover_ ,” Eddie predictably corrects, settling in front of the bench an awkward few feet away and proceeding to cross and uncross his arms, ultimately shoving his hands in the hoodie pockets. “Alright, kid, are you here with some people – your friends, or whatever? Mike said you had a bunch of them.”

“Um,” Dean intones, looking back at Richie before blinking up at Eddie. “Yeah.”

“You do?” Richie asks, then winces at Stan’s hard look; okay, maybe that was a _little_ insensitive.

Dean nods slowly, then hesitates a pair of beats before he unwraps one hand from around his knees to point at a small huddle of wide-eyed kids near the cotton candy. 

“Do they know what’s going on?” Bev asks quietly, moving closer to Dean, until she’s standing in front of where he sits on the bench.

“You mean about – ?“ Dean pauses, his mouth twisting in shapes for a few seconds while his eyes dart between all of them. “The monster clown? Yeah, I – I texted them. About It.”

“Fucking phones,” Eddie mutters, taking a deep breath, then settling his expression with a familiar, professional humorlessness. He takes a step closer, voice dropping, “If you’ve been blasting shit about what happened tonight, especially Richie’s involvement, I swear, I’ll make everyone think you pissed your pants in History class.”

Dean’s mouth drops open, almost looking more horrified than he had when Pennywise tried to eat him.

“Jesus Christ, Eds,” Richie laughs, reaching out to shove at Eddie’s hip with the tips of his fingers. “Turn off.”

“Tactful, as ever,” Stan mutters flatly, clearing his throat with a sideways glance in the other direction.

“Don’t split up again,” Bev says, kneeling down next to Dean and staring him in the eyes with her softly stern face. “You have to stick together, okay? That’s the only way you can help each other.”

Dean nods slowly, briefly glancing over at his friends. “We won’t.”

“Good,” Bev says, nodding, then standing up and taking a step back, looking over Richie’s head for a brief moment. She glances back to Dean, then pointedly up to the sky. “It’s getting kind of dark, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, um,” Dean stutters, shoving up from the bench with an awkward lean back and forth on his feet. “I should go home. It was nice meeting you.”

“You, too,” Stan says, a sad sort of smile flickering across his face before it settles back neutral.

Dean slips between Bev and Eddie, rushing toward his friends, who all predictably shriek in a way that distance can’t muffle. He points back over his shoulder with a thumb, then starts gesturing widely, then high over his head, and it’s pretty clear, pretty quick that he’s describing Pennywise to them.

Mike and Bill make their way back slowly while sharing a hushed, urgent conversation, judging by the looks and the gestures. They both look to Dean, still with his friends by the cotton candy, then back to each other, and seem completely unaware of how Ben lags multiple steps behind, staring hard at his phone with a furrowed brow.

“Whatcha d _o_ in’?” Richie asks, once they all get close, pitching his voice upward; no one seems to get the reference except Eddie, who sighs through his nose.

“I had to agree to design the next one, for them not to sue,” Ben says, looking up from his phone with a hum, only to go still for a beat, then shoving it into his pocket with a put-upon sigh that actually sounds _exaggerated_. “Not build it or anything, thankfully, but what do you guys think about color-coded LEDs? Like primary colors. I think it’d make the paths easier to navigate while still being carnival-like.”

Bev is the first to react, when the Losers go uniformly silent, chuckling in a way that makes her eyes curl. “I hope I never see it.”

“Me neither,” Ben agrees, smiling back, staring softly at Bev like he’s surprised.

“I really don’t want to leave that kid a-al-alone,” Bill says, swallowing visibly and briefly wringing his hands together. “But we – we have to k-kill it tonight. We _have_ to.”

“We can’t do both at once.” Mike says, reaching out and wrapping his hand around Bill’s shoulder, crumpling his shirt while giving it a squeeze. “He’ll be safe with his friends. Like we were.”

Richie straightens his glasses with a press of his finger against the bridge, glancing over to where Dean is still nervously smiling while relating the story to said friends. He doesn’t think the kids look like they could protect much of anything, barely teenagers, but he knows they probably all _think_ they can, which might prove enough for one night. A similar idiocy had lasted the Losers an entire summer.

“Tonight?” Eddie exclaims, a little belated, his eyes sweeping back and forth over the Losers while his expression twists with apprehension. “But we need, uh,” he hesitates, looking down at his hands, then his eyes go wide when he looks back up. “Flashlights and – and _ropes_ , and maybe some hard hats!”

“Hard hats,” Richie repeats, pitching his voice in his best imitation of tiny, squeaky teenage Eddie.

“You know I’m right!” Eddie says, swiping his hand out while pointing hard at Richie, then somewhere out toward the street. “Those sewers were fucking falling apart in the _Eighties_!”

“I’ve got some stuff,” Mike says, gesturing in some vague direction, then looking imploring at Eddie. “If Eddie could take us.”

“What am I – a goddamn bus driver?” Eddie spits, gesturing up, then back and forth with one hand.

“Maybe you should have rented something more practical,” Stan says, shifting on his feet while leveling Eddie with a _look_.

Eddie blinks slowly, jaw shifting and head tilting just slightly while he turns to peer at Stan with a particularly poisonous look, as the criticism fails to roll off his back like it did this morning. “Apparently, I fucking did, Stan!” He erupts, gesturing with a slice through the air in the direction of the lot. “I don’t see your shitty budget sedan helping out the group.”

Stan placidly blinks back. “It’s a Volt.”

Eddie leans forward in that particular way where he’s about to put his hands on his hips. “Oh, so did it run out of fucking electricity, you shitbird hippie?!”

Richie snorts loudly, steering Eddie with a series of taps at his shoulder toward the street; it’s the same thing he does at after parties and award shows, subtle enough to get Eddie where he needs without setting him off about it. It only really works when Eddie’s too distracted yelling at someone else to find it condescending, but that is pretty damned often.

“I thought Richie had a Tesla,” Stan says, brow raising, mouth settling in a mild line.

Eddie rolls his eyes, turning on his heel while pulling out the Cadillac keys with a terse shake of his head.

Mike directs Eddie toward the library, only a few streets away, rather than the farm. He jumps out and goes for a side door that Richie doesn’t remember being there, unlocking it with a small ring of far-too-many jangling keys; it reveals a darkened, creaky staircase, leading up into an area Richie had assumed was just empty, insulated space between the roof and the library.

“Wait… Mike,” Stan says, glancing back and forth with a furrowing brow while they file into the attic. “Do you _live_ here?”

“I had no clue the library had this up here,” Ben says, glancing around in the musty corners like his whole world-view has tilted. He leans into a one of the posts, peering down at some the books, then looks up with a slanted frown. “Where do you eat, Mikey?”

“Uh, somewhere,” Mike says, digging a trunk out of the corner and throwing it open to reveal a couple of flashlights, ropes, a pair of dirty boots, and a bunch of weird little knickknacks.

Richie reaches out and picks up what looks like an actual arrowhead, sharp and clearly flint. He shrugs and hands it off to Bev, who holds it up to the light, curious, and revealing the edge to be so thin it’s nearly translucent.

“I got, um,” Mike starts gathering the flashlights, muttering unintelligibly under his breath while tucking them awkwardly into an elbow. He pulls out one with straps from beneath some apparent ceramic shards, shaking it out over the trunk. “Four and a headlamp.”

“Headlamp,” Eddie says, reaching out and snatching it from Mike’s hand with little more warning.

“Dork,” Richie says, dropping his eyes to watch Eddie’s fingers deftly untangle the straps.

“Safe!” Eddie corrects sharply, affixing the lamp to his head with a scowl.

“I think I have a couple downstairs, too,” Mike says, shoving these flashlights at Bill, who nearly drops them before hugging them to his chest. He tugs the ropes out from the chest and loops them through his arm, up over his shoulder. “For power outages.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill takes a deep breath, “I think Richie said it best, when we were here last.”
> 
> Richie furrows his brows, glancing between the others for a quick beat; no one gives him so much as a cue, not even Eddie, who’s totally not getting a bonus this quarter. “Uh. Also thanks?”
> 
> Bev laughs lowly under her breath.
> 
> “…I don’t want to die?” Richie guesses, because he really cannot… Fuck. He takes a breath, rolling his head slightly while trying to put himself in the same place almost thirty years ago. “Oh,” he remembers, while the others just continue to stare at him, silently taunting, the immature group of assholes. “Yeah, of course – let’s kill that bastard clown!”
> 
> “C-close enough,” Bill says, smiling with a drop of his head, then slowly turning to continue up the stairs.

Eddie refuses to park the Cadillac closer than a block to the house, putting it in park and ignoring muttering complaints. He looks like he wishes he could get it even further, looking back over his shoulder a few times before they all turn out onto the corner of Neibolt street.

The house itself doesn’t seem to have changed, no more or less horrifying than it once was, though the last time they hadn’t gone into it in the _dark_. Richie glances back and forth, following Bill with his eyes while he jumps up the creaky stairs of the porch to regard them all in typical Big Bill fashion.

“Are you, uh,” Eddie pauses, shifting loudly on his feet, “Going to say something?”

“Just, I – I guess, thank you,” Bill says, rocking slightly, then taking a deep breath with a look down at the ground. He nods a beat later, then and looks up with a pressed smile, “I’m the reason we’re all here, because I couldn’t let go of Georgie, and it was insane, but you guys followed me anyway – followed me right in, despite how awful that was the first and second and… now a third time. So I…” He takes another deep breath, “I think Richie said it best, when we were here last.”

Richie furrows his brows, glancing between the others for a quick beat; no one gives him so much as a cue, not even Eddie, who’s totally not getting a bonus this quarter. “Uh. Also thanks?”

Bev laughs lowly under her breath.

“…I don’t want to die?” Richie guesses, because he really cannot… _Fuck_. He takes a breath, rolling his head slightly while trying to put himself in the same place almost thirty years ago. “Oh,” he remembers, while the others just continue to stare at him, silently taunting, the immature group of assholes. “ _Yeah_ , of course – let’s kill that bastard clown!”

“C-close enough,” Bill says, smiling with a drop of his head, then slowly turning to continue up the stairs. He reaches for the door, hesitating a noticeable beat before turning the handle and pushing it open to reveal a shadowy void behind it. He looks back over his shoulder, sending a nod, which seems to be sign enough for everyone to follow him up into the house.

The inside is the same as the outside, no different but still not fucking great – dark and musty, rotting down to the supports, with a few dead leaves from autumn trees in scattered piles. Richie glances to the sitting room, where he’d once found a missing poster, then to the dining room, where Eddie had started gagging about mold.

“Hey,” Richie says, forcing his voice into something bright and airy, as he looks behind him, gesturing up the stairs they will definitely be avoiding this trip. “What if this time the house is full of like… cute shit instead of our dead classmates? Maybe It’ll pull a _switcheroo_.”

Stan grumbles something that might have been a ‘ _beep beep_ ’, hesitating firmly in the entryway in a flicker of déjà vu. He steps forward in the next instant without anyone prompting him to move this time, taking a deep breath while swapping the flashlight between his hands and shaking of his head. “Let’s just go.”

Bill walks further into the house, sweeping his flashlight back and forth until it lands on a familiar hall. He looks backward to Eddie, then Richie, reluctantly also more familiar, then goes toward a rickety door into the kitchen. He gasps slightly, rushing forward and reaches out to tap at a broken door, revealing a familiar horrible staircase down to the basement. “I think this is it!”

Richie startles back on his heel at a muffle grown, eyes going wide at the basement door, only to realize with more dread that it’s come from behind him in the hall at about the same time all the doors slam shut in the kitchen. He sweeps the flashlight around frantically, swallowing hard when he realizes only he, Eddie, and Bill have made it in; the original Neibolt dream team.

A pitchy, animal whine echoes throughout the room, along with a bunch of… scratching, then an even louder whine. Richie slides his eyes sideways, staring hard at the fridge while feeling his jaw drop slightly open; he looks over to Bill, then Eddie, who’s started to hunch himself up in the hoodie. “That can’t be… _good_ , right?”

Eddie shakes his head rapidly, taking a step away with an urgency that has Richie doing the same.

A tiny _bark_ abruptly sounds, then the door of the fridge knocks and swings open to reveal a _criminally_ small and fluffy dog.

“Damn it, Ri-Richie,” Bill says, while Eddie and Richie step in to crowd closer to him, as the tiny thing hops out of the fridge, promptly starting to spin in circles around them with a markedly happy bark.

“Cute shit?” Richie says, glancing to Bill, who sends him a frowning, unconvinced glare.

“Someone make it sit,” Eddie mutters, then his hand makes contact with Richie’s back, tapping with some significance. “Richie?”

Richie sends a disbelieving glance backward, only to get a stern look back, and reaches up to scratch at the skin behind his ear while he reluctantly clears his throat. He may as well _try_ ; at least, if it doesn’t work, he doesn’t have to go down into the well? It’s _some_ kind of better.

“ _What_?” Bill questions faintly, tucking his arms in when Richie moves around him. “Are you actually – ?”

“Hey there, buddy,” Richie says, sidestepping in front of the little dog and managing to stop its next cycle. He looks down at its big brown Eddie-bear eyes, then takes a shallow breath. “Sit.”

The dog doesn’t react for a few, unsettling beats, then sits slowly, its tiny tail wagging behind it.

“Aw, fuck,” Eddie says, his voice faint just over Richie’s shoulder. “It _is_ kind of cute.”

Bill hums dubiously, feet audibly moving backward on the creaky floor. “Why would it actually – ?”

The dog turns its head looking at Bill, then stands back up, only to suddenly let loose a terrifying squeal while its body warps like fucking play-doh in seconds into a horrifying, mutated purse-dog version of a werewolf. It blinks at Richie from the spare inch that separates them, then tilts its head teeth with a pitchy growl.

Richie squeaks, stumbling back a few steps and thoroughly eating it onto the ground. “Shit, fuck!”

“Richie!” Eddie yells, at the same moment the thing leaps, pinning Richie to the ground and going for his face with a set of rotting, uneven teeth erupting from its stunted, skeletal jaw.

Richie twists against the dog, teeth gnashing and rank breath against his forehead, and incidentally catches a glimpse of Eddie, becoming even more upset to see him terrified, both hands holding the hoodie up over his nose with his face all tight wrinkles and wide eyes. It’s the worst expression he could have, and even an instant of seeing it makes all of this so much worse – Richie’s own face is about to get eaten off and somehow he feels kind of _bad_ about it; goddamn, Eddie has such an embarrassing as fuck hold on him.

He can vaguely hear banging on the other side of the door, voices raising, and the distraction nearly ends him when the monster gets close enough to fling his glasses from his face. He toys with the idea of somehow rolling out, but his grip is already tenuous at best, and Bill, who is apparently helping somehow, though it doesn’t feel like he’s doing much, seems to concur by the shifting, skidding of his feet against the grimy ground.

The door bursts open with a spray of wood fiber, remarkably like when Bowers attacked, except this time Ben tackles both Bill and the dog to the ground with a shocked expression and a loud _oof_. The two of them wrestle it to the ground while Richie shuffles backward blindly, watching the blur writhe, then abruptly there’s a squeal, extended and pained, which thankfully sounds like it came from the monster.

“You okay, guys?” Mike asks, and presumably it is his flashlight starting a rave in this appallingly decorated, closed-plan kitchen.

“He could have f-fucking died!” Bill erupts, abruptly rearing off the monster and storming over to where Eddie’s cowered in the corner, his voice raising into a shout. “What the fuck – d-do-don’t you _care_?!”

Richie hastily throws his hand out, trying to get his glasses, and smiles fleetingly at Bev when she shoves them onto his face.

“I – I do,” Eddie croaks, chest rising and sinking quickly, hand scrambling toward a pocket while his eyes dropping from Bill’s face down to the ground. “It – It’s _Richie,_ of course, I – I – I’m sorry, after I told – ” He inhales a wheezing breath, sucking in the fabric of the hoodie. “I got s-so scared – I couldn’t even – ”

“That’s what It wants!” Bill snaps, lurching forward as if to menace Eddie; he’s got Mike behind him, who’s barely moving at all and just letting Bill rant.

Richie shoves up off the ground, perfunctorily clearing his face with the sleeve on his arm while his panic at the monster cedes to a bursting resentment. He can’t fucking believe that Bill’s doing this, acting like they’re still kids and he’s their de facto leader, and all this after Eddie rescued him in the maze.

“B-B- _Bill_ ,” he says, lowering his voice while taking a step forward and watching Bill’s eyes drag up to his face; he’s never really felt taller than Bill before, at least not like he does right now. “This is the _third_ time fucking today, alright? Get off his dick.”

Bill regards Richie for a long beat, then glances to Eddie before looking toward the door down into the well basement with a slow nod of his head. Mike follows him a beat later, a pressed mouth smile across his face while he follows after Bill, settling Richie with a shrug.

Richie watches Eddie hesitantly straighten against the wall, stepping forward into the emptied space. “You okay?”

Eddie’s blinks rapidly and his jaw oddly drops open, the hoodie falling from his nose. He’s still breathing hard, but the breaths seem more measured, and one of his hands drops to pull the hoodie tighter around himself while the other reaches out to tap shakily at Richie’s elbow. “Yeah, Rich, I – I’m fine, are _you_?”

“Just a little damp,” Richie says, wiping some of the frankly horrifying drool from his neck, then looking at it on his fingertips for a beat before reaching out, on what feels so natural it could be called a reflex, to wipe it onto Eddie’s cheek.

“Bastard!” Eddie yelps, some fear visibly fading while he darts backward on his heels, hastily wiping at his cheek with both hands. “This could have acid!”

“Don’t give It any more ideas,” Stan says, with heavy sigh, passing behind them to go down the stairs.

The journey down the well is just as horrifying as ever, dank and rank, echoing with little noises of disgust from all of them, but mostly Eddie, who’s mumbling what might sound like prayers to the untrained ear, but Richie can easily make out the curses to everything between listeria and trichococcus. The tunnel opens up into a familiar cistern blessedly absent any floating kids, but still full of trash and fetid sewer water, an upturned circus caravan featured in the middle like an invitation.

Richie takes a breath before hopping into the deeper water behind Stan, lifting his hands, then hears a yelp behind him and sees with a grimace that it reaches up around Eddie’s nipple-line. He’s never getting that hoodie back – in fact, he doesn’t want it back, he doesn’t even want the clothes that he is wearing himself back.

Bev suddenly yells and a hasty glance backward reveals she’s been captured by what might be a woman, if she were naked and toothy, eyes bulging in the wrong directions and skin a cadaverous pale.

“Time to sink!” The crone cackles, dragging a struggling Bev underneath the water.

“What!?” Eddie yelps, his voice tight, as everyone else dives in after Bev and the naked freak.

Richie follows suit, on the edge of panic and maybe a little peer pressure, not quite thinking about the solid pieces of gunk nudging at his fingertips while he reaches out toward where Bev disappeared under the water. He surfaces a few seconds later, feeling like he’s done nothing, but he can hear Bev coughing behind him, so Ben probably got her – or something else, but probably Ben. Richie just gets to wade back up to the caravan feeling a little dumb, standing between Eddie and Stan, who looks at him in particular like he’s lost his marbles.

“I can be heroic,” Richie mumbles, swiping grey-water soaked hair out of his face with both hands and ignoring Eddie’s resulting gag.

“In the depths is where It crept,” Mike mutters, scrambling up out of the water and stepping up in the hatch to the caravan. “In the beneath to find belief.”

Stan raises an eyebrow high, staring hard at Mike, then looking to Bill, who spreads his hands in a shrug.

“In the depths is where it crept, in the beneath to find belief,” Mike repeats, slightly louder while taking a deep breath and shifting from foot to foot.

“What’s down there?” Bev asks, her voice a little punchy before Mike can continue his mantra.

“No one knows,” Mike says gravely, then abruptly bends down to open it, as if that ominous shit was warning enough.

A tunnel barely the diameter of the hatch itself lies underneath, dark and void-like, yet somehow, despite everything, nothing jumps out to eat them. It’s just a jagged, wet, smelly hole, seemingly going endlessly into the earth.

Richie whistles lowly, leaning over the hatch and trying not to get vertigo. “So that’s straight to hell, right?”

“Hell is a concept,” Stan announces, taking a deep breath and shoving forward to the front of the group to abruptly start descending the tunnel.

“Oh my _god_?” Richie says, watching Stan’s head disappear before looking to Eddie, who’s scrunched up in a startled shrug. “Should’ve asked him about the wife – I think he has changed that much.”

“Beep, beep,” Stan says, voice echoing angrily up the tunnel. “Unless you want me to start asking _you_ shit.”

Mike shakes his head and steps down in after Stan, blinking rapidly like he hadn’t expected the enthusiasm, which he shouldn’t have, but Stan is apparently having another mic-drop moment. Bill follows soon after, disappearing down into the dark.

“I don’t – ” Eddie’s voice breaks. He shakes his head when Richie looks back, wincing while he bites his injured cheek, and takes a decisive step back away from the hatch and the rest of them.

Richie follows him, ignoring Bev’s worried stare and Ben’s soft concern. “Eds?”

“Something about this fucking… this stupid place, Richie,” Eddie says, shaking his head again and looking down at their feet. “It makes me feel like I’m that kid again. Just… _afraid_. I don’t want to be the reason that someone doesn’t…” He exhales, then his voice goes even softer. “Come back.”

“As if,” Richie says, reaching out and anxiously hovering a hand over his elbow.

Eddie’s face screws up with frustration. “I was so scared I almost let It – ”

“So? That’s _one_ fucking thing,” Richie says, swallowing hard and letting his hand make contact, latching his fingers against the damp fabric of his hoodie and Eddie’s narrow elbow underneath it. “Ignore Bill! Who fucking… _stabbed_ Bowers back, huh, bleeding all over yourself; who choked a goddamn leper monster? Who broke his phone on a clown?”

Eddie tips his head, dark lashes flicking up and then down. “…Me.”

“And that’s not even counting all the crazy shit you do at home,” Richie says, squeezing at Eddie’s elbow and shifting in a half step closer, staring hard into his eyes and unsure if he hopes or dreads that Eddie can hear the emotion Richie can feel expanding beneath his sternum. “You’re braver than you think, you’ve always been, and – and qualified, even, since you’ve apparently been training for this creepy as fuck rock tunnel.”

Eddie huffs quietly, lips rolling together like they do when he’s trying not to smile. “Idiot.”

“Eds,” Richie mutters, leaning forward with an idle wish of some kind of dramatic first kiss, but he manages to ease instead into a brief press of their foreheads together. “You know I can’t do shit without you.”

“That’s true,” Eddie mutters, his head turning, brow rocking up against Richie’s to pause briefly and – _and_ okay, no, he’s pulling away. “Alright. _Fine_.”

Richie nods back, exhaling softly through his nose, then reluctantly releases Eddie’s arm while turning back around. He blinks slightly when he sees that Ben and Bev have been watching, feeling heat flood his face, and approaches the hatch with a brief look back at Eddie’s still anxious expression. He gives him a weak smile, only to blink when Bev shoves the fencepost between them at Eddie, who looks just as startled, staring at it a long beat before glancing up.

“Don’t you remember?” Bev says, pushing it at Eddie again with another gesture. “This can hurt monsters, if you believe it enough.”

Eddie hesitates a beat, then nods, reaching out and taking the post with a lengthy exhale. “…Thanks.”

“Eddie equipped fencepost,” Richie says, shoulder-checking Eddie gently while doing a nasally goblin Voice.

“Shut up,” Eddie says, gesturing with the post toward the hole with a visible swallow, urging Richie to go in after Bev. “You just… just get down there and concentrate on making it to your next show.”

“No promises there,” Richie says, exhaling an exaggerated sigh, then looking down the hole and forcing himself to drop his legs in with a hard swallow – goddamn, if he falls, it’s going to be really embarrassing. “You know I fucking hate Indianapolis.”

Bev sputters with laughter below them. “Why?”

“He got so white girl wasted once he thought a fake train station was real,” Eddie says, his laugh weak, but bolstering as it echoes down the tunnel. “He fucking flipped.”

“Oh, man, Richie,” Ben says, a little too patronizing, then offering a thoughtful hum. “That hotel is beautiful, though.”

Richie slips on a rock and the conversation lulls, mostly heavy breathing and trying not to get loose on the rocks. It’s wet with presumed sewer water, slippery for it, and he’s pretty sure he just ripped a hole in his jacket with the misstep. He exhales heavily when he finally hits bottom, not the end and still narrow, but longer vertical; he follows Ben through the tunnel, glancing backward to see Eddie grimacing at his hands in the light of his little headlamp.

“It was the funniest shit, I –” Eddie pauses, easing down into the main cavern with an easy hop and clearing his throat. “I’ll send you guys a video if we get out of this.”

“ _When_ , Eddie,” Stan says, his mouth settling into a particular sternness that was absent the last time they did this, nearly thirty years ago, as he looks at the center and its suspiciously arranged stalagmites. “The only thing not getting out of this is that fucking clown.”

Richie raises his eyebrows high, then looks sideways to Eddie, confirming that he’s making a similar expression. He shrugs back, mouth turning downward in a comical grimace while gesturing at the center.

“I guess we should start,” Mike says, rubbing his hands together before pulling out the leather casket from earlier and popping the top. He pulls out a matchbook next, then lights one, and - _okay_ , he’s starting a fire inside of it. “Now,” He nods at the lit casket, flame gently peeking from the inside despite an evident lack of fuel. “Your artifacts. The past must burn with the present.”

Richie thumbs the token in his pocket, a little surprised it survived the dive in the water, and glances around watching while everyone takes out their own artifacts. He sees Ben pull something from his wallet and Stan scrunch something in his hand, Bev holding a postcard and Eddie holding a bag, Mike palming something between both hands, as everyone awkwardly looks around at each other.

Bill clears his throat, predictably taking the lead and holding out a – a paper boat? “The boat I – I made with Georgie.”

Richie feels his eyes go wide, brows going up; well, maybe it wasn’t _that_ odd the Capitol still had tokens. Apparently. He stares as the paper drops into the casket, waiting for the flame to turn ominous colors or flare, but it just licks up the paper in a pleasant orange.

“It’s a scrip for an inhaler,” Eddie says next, holding out a yellowing bag sealed with a stapled receipt, crumpled between his fingers. “I dropped it last time in the pharmacy basement.”

Richie huffs slightly, watching the old wax bag limply fold down into the fire. “Is that going to blow up?”

“ _No_ ,” Eddie says, though the look he sends at the fire is less than confident.

Bev twists a folded, vaguely familiar postcard between her fingers. “Something I… I wish I’d held onto.”

Ben watches the postcard go up, his brow furrowing, then unfolds his own piece of paper. “A page from my yearbook… that only one person signed,” he pauses, looking across the circle and unaware of Bev staring at the paper, wearing a look on her face that betrays the certainty her signature on it. “I should’ve…forgotten it, but I kept it in my wallet. For 27 years.”

Richie blinks slowly, shaking his head once in disbelief. He thought his crush was sad and hopeless, but Ben stands there as the reigning champion in yearning, staring at a piece of paper for thirty years, now… forced to burn it because Mike said it was magic.

“From the Capitol arcade,” Richie says, holding up the little silver token in his finger and thumb and turning it slightly to show off.

“An actual token?” Eddie says, his head tilting with a twisting, sideways frown, reacting exactly the way Richie had known he would when he picked it up. “Fucking _Christ_ , Rich. Not everything is a joke!”

“It’s tied to a shitty memory!” Richie says, flicking it off his thumb into the little casket.

Eddie sighs heavily, glowering under his brows. “If this doesn’t work, I’m blaming you.”

Stan clears his throat loudly, skillfully cutting through the argument, and holds up a kippah between his fingers – blue with ornately embroidered trim. “The kippah from my bar mitzvah.”

“Are you allowed to burn that?” Richie asks, watching Stan fold it up to fit better into the casket.

“It’s a hat, Richie,” Stan says, dropping it into the fire with a flat look sideways, barely reacting when the flames flare against his fingertips.

“Kind of a fancy one,” Richie mutters, watching the sparks fly out of the hole.

Mike clears his throat, holding up a… a rock, small and vaguely triangular. He looks oddly proud of it, briefly sweeping his eyes over the rest of the Losers before fixing his eyes back on Bev. “You see that, Bev? It’s where you hit Bowers.”

Bev nods slowly, a ghost of a smile across her face, and the rock turns, revealing a deep red stain across a jagged edge. “The rock fight.”

Mike nods with a small grin, if serious and low, his eyes falling while he drops the rock into the casket. “That was the moment I felt _part_ of the Losers. All seven of us.”

“That is…” Eddie inhales, brows going up for a beat while his eyes roll toward Mike. “A rock. You’re trying to burn a rock.”

“Symbolism,” Mike says, his smile somehow only a little strained. He nods again, then holds out his hands, “Grab hands – come on.”

Richie reaches out, taking hold of Stan’s hand, then sending a weak smirk in the other direction while Eddie leans his post on his leg and pulls up the sleeves of his hoodie with some difficulty, the folds having fallen hours ago.

“Shut up,” Eddie mutters, taking his hand and soundly lacing their fingers together tight.

Mike takes a deep breath, glancing over all of them before looking down at the burning tokens, only for the fire to abruptly disappear with the sparest wisp of smoke.

Richie stares at the quashed fire, taken aback and swallowing hard. He exhales a shaky breath, reflexively trying to think of a joke, only for something to burst with light above them, illuminating the cavern; he looks up, jaw dropping slightly in disbelief as the cavern walls start to undulate with teeth and – shit, it kind of looks like a vagina. He almost wants to laugh, because holy shit is this another gay symbolism thing? Paul Bunyan wasn’t enough, now he gets to see a giant version of Derry dentata.

“Fuck is that?” Bill gasps, audibly bewildered.

“Don’t look at them!” Mike says, his voice rushed and his tug traveling through the whole circle of Losers. “Deadlights! Don’t look!”

“Shit,” Eddie mutters, his fingers clutching hard at Richie’s while he presumably squeezes his eyes shut.

“Turn light into dark,” Mike starts chanting, hurriedly prompting everyone else to do the same, until their uneven chanting is echoing over and over through the cavern.

Richie’s grimaces harder the longer the chanting goes on, feeling something not quite like a chill raising the hair across every inch of his skin. He swallows hard before every one of his next few chants, the words thick on his tongue and wanting to flinch away, then the feeling seems to spike, a glow in front of his eyelids and a not-quite whisper between his ears urging him to open his eyes.

He startles when it goes dark again in the opposite of a flash, warily peeking open his eyes in time to watch Mike shoving a _lid_ on the casket. It doesn’t seem to fit no matter how hard Mike presses it, and Richie starts to get an awful feeling just as a welt of red grows around the seam of the lid.

“Is this part of it?” Richie asks desperately, hearing his voice emerge a pitch too high.

Mike visibly starts to panic, which is the opposite of comforting, while he tries to press the lid on further over the welt. “Keep chanting!”

The Losers reluctantly start to go again, even less in sync, but the red grows and grows, spilling out of the casket – shit, it’s a fucking _balloon_. It slowly becomes too big to stand next to, shoving them from the center of the cavern, and Richie reluctantly lets go of Stan and Eddie to uncomfortably squeeze through a hole, glancing backward to make sure they do the same and then abruptly finds himself on his back when the balloon pops on a stalagmite.

“Fuck,” Richie groans at the cavern ceiling, no longer undulating, so that’s a small favor. His ears won’t stop ringing, though, but he thinks the others are yelling at each other, looking around at them with a tip of his head against the rocky floor to see them all picking up flashlights while his hearing slowly recovers enough to separate the voices.

“Is it dead?” Eddie asks, looking toward Mike while reaching out to help Richie get up. “Mikey, did we – ”

Bev does the disservice of lighting up the center, revealing the bastard clown is definitely still alive and incredibly, _incredibly_ large.

Richie stumbles backward while still holding onto Eddie, nearly upsetting them both back onto the ground.

Stan mutters something harsh in Hebrew, sounding so much like his father that Richie is struck with an untimely memory of Rabbi Uris sternly looking down at him on a basement floor. He doesn’t even remember what he did, but he’s _pretty_ sure it wasn’t as bad as trying to murder his son.

Pennywise gives his pitchy giggle. “Did it work? Oh, silly _Mikey_ , are you going to tell them?” He asks, condescending and scolding, leaning out of the stalagmites with a widely tilting head. “Or should I? Tell them why you little ritual was doomed from the start – oh yes, even with all _seven_.”

Richie rolls his lips together, tightly biting down while swallowing hard, and sending a quick look sideways. He makes brief, bemused eye contact with Stan, who looks genuinely puzzled and no little shaken, all of his earlier certainty faded into the fear with the rest of them.

“Oh, Mikey,” Pennywise says, kneeling and gesturing while the cavern lights up behind him from the deadlights. “Did you really forget to show them the fourth side of your little box? But it’s the most exciting part!”

“No,” Mike says, his voice pitching high toward breaking in that single word. “I – I just didn’t think it mattered!”

“Mike,” Bill says, a little wheezy but no less disbelieving for it, turning his wide eyes on Mike. “What is It t-ta-talking about?”

“I – I never said it worked for the Shokopiwah! Because if it had, we wouldn’t even need – ” Mike gestures at Pennywise, his face crumpling and eyes briefly squeezing shut in the first moment of real doubt that Richie has seen on him, making him seem so much smaller, more desperate. “They just didn’t believe, you guys! They didn’t think they could do it – I know we can, we just… We just _need_ to believe we can kill it! We hurt it before, didn’t we?!”

“Mike,” Eddie says, his mouth half open and feet shuffling back a few more steps. “What the fuck?”

“It can work for us!” Mike reiterates, his hands tightening into fists at his sides, looking around at everyone with a forced confidence.

“But it didn’t,” Ben says, his voice soft, but no less steely for it.

Pennywise starts to cackle again, emerging further out of the stalagmites, revealing that it hadn’t actually been kneeling at all, but is now instead built and crawling like a bug – or a spider, considering the _number_ of _legs_. “For twenty-seven years, I have waited… I have _craved_.”

“Move!” Ben yelps, trying to push everyone back in his typical helpful Haystack personality.

Mike is the only one who doesn’t move, staring down It’s approach with that same desperation.

“Mike!” Bill says, hunched behind a rock, trying to grab Mike’s stunned attention with a pleading voice and frantic gestures. “Mike, come on, move!”

Mike doesn’t so much as look at Bill, or any of the Losers, his shoulders slumping in visible surrender. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I – I really thought, if we were all – ”

Pennywise lifts a hand with a cackle, which quickly become some sort of giant, single claw. “Time to float!”

Bill dives as Pennywise moves, tackling Mike to the ground in a cloud of dust caused by the impact of the claw. “Come on!”

Pennywise roars in frustration and they all start moving, scrambling to get as far away as they can with Eddie predictably in the front.

The cave is full of nooks and crannies, a few crooked gaps, and Richie reaches out to shove Eddie at the same time Eddie yanks his shoulder, nearly making them both fall on the hard, rocky ground before either of them can get into a chasm. It’s impossible next- _level_ insane, really – no one else follows them in, seemingly not even noticing they’ve fallen out of the group. Richie can’t blame them; he can barely even think right now, trying to shove his shock and his fear into the back of his mind for, hopefully, later – not to mention, since when the fuck has the alien clown been an alien _spider_ clown? That shit wasn’t in the slides.

“I – I wasn’t serious about blaming you,” Eddie says, his voice a little muffled from where his face is pressed into Richie’s shoulder, presumably peeking over it to join in watching Pennywise screaming on the other side of the cavern. It’s hard to tell if anyone is actually over there, in danger, or if he’s only taunting them in hiding.

“I know,” Richie pants, blindly reaching back and patting Eddie vaguely on the side, then letting his hand just rest on his hip. “You kind of never are.”

Eddie laughs weakly, and Richie’s hand falls when he shoves back. “Shit. I am _sometimes_.”

Pennywise suddenly skitters right around on Its eight fucking legs to look straight at them, as if it had heard, and starts cackling while throwing out a horrifying, suckering tentacle. The tunnel is thankfully deep, if a little chilling in its own right, and somehow they run fast enough through it that It doesn’t trip one of them, only to skid to a stop at the end when a familiar sight rises in front of Richie.

“Jesus Christ, a bunch of fucking closets?” Eddie sneers, glancing back and forth across the Not Scary At All to Very Scary with a few back and forth jerks of his head, like they’ll disappear if he glares hard enough at them. “How fucking _subtle_.”

Richie rolls his eyes, reaching out to shove Eddie into shoulder. “It’s not about that – I was here last time with Bill.”

“Pretty sure you were still you, dude,” Eddie says, his voice dropping a little snide while he sends a flat look upward. He pokes finger at Richie’s chest, “Mister _I joked about jerking it to models in Vogue_ until 2010.”

Richie swallows slightly, stung slightly by the reminder, especially only hours from the first time he really felt like he was going to die just for being gay. “Fuck you. Bowers and Paul Bunyan tried to kill me.”

Eddie scoffs shortly, seeming almost indifferent. “And my _mom_ told me I was going to get AIDS every ten seconds until she fucking died.”

“Well… _Jesus_ ,” Richie says, feeling his shoulders hunch around his head and almost forgetting for an entire second about the actual monster trying to eat them with of the sudden swell of awkward. “I kind of forgot about that.”

“Lucky you,” Eddie snipes, then takes a deep breath, pointing between the doors with a waving finger. “Pick a damned door, closet case.”

“Fuck you, _you_ pick one,” Richie says, hearing his voice drop slightly and suffering a flare of mortified heat across the back of his ears; he knows Eddie’s an asshole, but it sucks the most when it’s an _accident_. He swallows hard, tucking his hands into his pockets and elbow into his sides. “I already did this shit once.”

Eddie glancing backward over his shoulder with a twisting, aggrandized frown, only to then do an apparent double take, his expression shrinking with apparent remorse. “Sorry, Rich. I didn’t – ”

“It’s not like it wasn’t true,” Richie says, looking away from Eddie and concentrating on the doors rather than the persistent tightness in his chest. He forces what he hopes looks like an easy shrug. “Open sesame, Edsie Spaghedsie.”

Eddie sighs hard, but shuffles sideways, then back the other direction to reach out slowly for the Scary door. He hesitates a beat more before turning the knob and pulling it open, revealing a vaguely familiar kitchen hall, table and phone on one side and a window framing sunshine against the wall from the other.

“Is that your old house?” Richie asks, peering over Eddie’s shoulder and glancing back and forth into the once-familiar space.

Eddie lets go of the doorknob, moving a step forward. “Yeah? It’s – ”

“Eddie-bear!” A familiar voice shrieks, followed by a series of thunderous footsteps that reveal a woman with grey hair and sallow skin on a falling face. “My baby! What are you doing with that _dirty boy_ again?! Let me – ”

The door is swiftly slammed shut across Sonia Kaspbrak’s lurching form; apparently, she hadn’t… aged well, though her charming personality had stayed blessedly exactly the same. Richie almost missed being called dirty – oh wait, no, he really hasn’t, and he could have done with forgetting that she had ever called him that for _forever_. It always made him feel like she knew exactly what sort of thoughts he had – _has_ about her son.

Eddie exhales hard and reaches up, running his empty hand tightly across his neck in a nervous gesture. “I fucking mentioned her; I was totally asking for that.”

The cave shakes and Richie glances quickly between the two other doors, tempted to reach out toward the one that had freed Bill and him so long ago. “Why’d you go for the middle one?”

“Because Not Scary At All is like an obvious trap, but then also wouldn’t It know that we know that, so make the Very Scary one also a trap? Right? I don’t know,” Eddie says, gesturing between the doors while he speaks in a near-rant, quick and snappy, but his anger not particularly aimed at anything. “It’s a goddamn illusion from fucking murder clown from outer space, Rich, why’re you making me explain?”

Richie takes a breath, then holds it while he shakes his head and offers a stilted shrug.

Pennywise cackles loud, the grating, pitchy noise echoing through the tunnel to wash over them, worryingly and undeniably victorious.

“Shit,” Eddie mutters, raising his brows and eyes lifting to make contact with Richie. “You think It – ”

“Damn it,” Richie interrupts, taking off back down toward the main cave and dreading what lies at the other end.

He skids to a stop at the end of the tunnel, eyes going wide at the sight of Mike trapped in a twisting tentacle with IT bearing down on him with a face that’s mostly a sharp, drooling mouth. He hastily bends down and picks up a rock, bouncing it in his palm once before he throws it, hard as he can, while thinking of that rock war, of Eddie and his phone, then whooping in something fiercer than relief when it clocks the stupid clown right on the jaw. “Hey, fuckface!”

Pennywise turns on Richie with a snarl, throwing Mike back into the cave wall, but most importantly letting him _go_.

"Close your eyes, dumbass!” Stan yells, voice ringing out from the other end of the cave. “Deadlights!”

Richie immediately squeezes his eyes shut, confidence faltering, “Yeah – you, fucking… _Goddamn_ it, Stan, I forgot what I was going to say!”

“So run!” Mike shouts, words followed by an outright terrifying skidding that’s too loud and has too many feet to be from the man himself.

Richie hastily tries to move backward blindly, tripping on a few stones and feeling like this is the worst time for him to be a klutz. “I can’t, I – ”

“ _Move_!” Eddie shrieks from behind, hand suddenly tugging at Richie’s arm and making them both stumble even worse. “Look at the ground or something, you stupid asshole; _come on_.”

“Shit, Eds, you’re gonna rip my arm off,” Richie says, fleeing back behind the rocks while the spiderfreak clown thunders behind them with a furious shriek.

“You fucking moron!” Eddie hisses, hand not clutching at Richie patting at the sides of his face and then down his shoulders, scared and ungentle for it. “What the fuck would I have done if you’d gotten caught in the deadlights, huh?”

 _Kiss me_ , Richie thinks immediately, then flinches at a crash of rock behind them, moving with a panicked hunch inward closer to Eddie. “It was attacking Mike.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, squeezing hard at Richie’s arm, eyes suddenly moving in a brief peek into the center of the chasm. “I know.”

Mike looks to be with Bill now, the two of them whispering behind a jutting rock. Richie looks over Eddie’s head and lifts a hand, waving weakly, watching for Mike to wave back with a widely-mouthed _thank you_ , then immediately ducks when Pennywise skitters around in front of them.

“Fuck, I – ” Eddie inhales, then exhales, looking back to Richie with decidedly more than wild eyes. “Remember I said I choked it?”

“Yeah?” Richie says, furrowing his brow and flinching again when another tremor travels through the cave. “Not quite sure you can get your little hands around Its neck right now.”

“Shut the hell up,” Eddie says unsteadily, then grimaces, shaking his head with one hand balling up on his knee. “Actually.”

“What?”

“It got smaller,” Eddie says, his voice a little uncertain, then he clears his throat while his eyes get harder, more certain. “When I fought back… Yeah. It got weaker, I guess.”

“So?” Richie says, slow, glancing to the side with a start when a few pebbles roll down the rockface.

“So _maybe_ we make It small enough that – ” Eddie shrugs tightly, free hand gesturing cyclically between them with furor. “We _can_ fit our hands around Its neck?”

“Make it – ” Richie gestures widely behind them at the literal screaming alien monster clown the size of a building. “ _How_?!”

Eddie snarls back, waving his fence post and literally stomping his foot. “I don’t know!”

Richie takes a deep breath, briefly hugging into his knees with a shake of his head. He bites down hard at his cheeks, counting to ten, then sits back up with an exaggerated scoff. “…I _guess_ we don’t have anything else.”

“No, we don’t,” Eddie says, nodding once before he stands, dragging Richie up with him while squeezing at his wrist like he had at the Jade of the Orient. “Hey guys! We have an idea!”

“We?” Richie hisses, tugging back just enough to shift his hand down the inch or so to hold Eddie’s properly, because if he’s going to die anyway, what the fuck does he have to lose? “I don’t want credit for this shitty idea.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie snaps back, squeezing his fingers this time, and somehow it makes all the difference.

“What?” Mike pants, skidding to a stop with a duck behind their section of jutting rocks.

“I choked it,” Eddie says, glancing to the side while the others arrive in hasty shifts, each looking worse than the last. “In the pharmacy, when I was getting my token. It got weaker when I fought back? I - I think maybe we might… I guess, be able to get it that way? But it’s just too fucking big to do that right now.”

Bill looks around, then nods quickly while scratching at the back his head. “So we just h-h-have to figure out how t-to make it small?”

“Is that blood?” Richie says, glancing sideways at Bev while swallowing hard and trying very hard not to gag; she and Ben are also holding hands, so… somehow Haystack has gotten that resolved in the middle of this literal hellhole. _His_ excuse is five years of history teaching adult Eddie to hold on and an instant of morbid courage. “Where’d you find blood?”

Bill abruptly takes a sharp breath, interrupting whatever Bev might’ve been about to say, as he gestures with a waving hand at all of them while looking over his shoulder. “We can l-lure it into one of the caverns – it would have to g-g-get smaller to follow us.”

Stan shakes his head, mouth pressing hard in way that emphasizes the new wounds that frame his face. “No way. Has It followed us _anywhere_ in here, physically? No. It just messes with our heads.”

Bill opens and closes his mouth, then demonstrably scowls. “F-fuck you, Stan.”

“You know…” Mike takes a breath, rolling his lips together briefly before glancing between all of them with a nod. “There’s more than one way to make someone _feel_ small.”

“That’s even more dumb,” Stan says flatly, sending a familiar flat look to Richie; the _‘I thought you were an idiot, but wow, this guy’_ look.

“But It _sort of_ shrank a little, didn’t it, when Richie and Mike called it names?” Ben says, grimacing in a way that is clearly a very stressed attempt at a smile.

Richie glances sideways to see the others nodding slowly, even Eddie, all looking more hopeful than actually confident. He reluctantly shrugs, joining in, then jumps slightly when he hears a decidedly monstrous cackle from the main chamber. “You know, what the fuck,” he says, trying to force a laugh, only to barely exhale. “Why not? It’s kind of just a big freaky alien clown _bully_ and… bullies can’t take the taste of their own shit.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, his expression a little more hopeful, though considering he’s the guy who called them all back here to begin with, his judgment is in question. “Exactly.”

“And you talked about that b-belief,” Bill says, jumping in with another gesture out into the chamber, even more aggressive than the last. “That we stopped believing it was s-scary when we were kids and _sort of_ killed it? Same th-thing.”

“Yeah,” Bev says, grimacing slightly while sweeping a lock of soaked, limp hair out from her face. “We just have to… finish the job this time.”

“I’ve still got this,” Eddie says, gesturing with his fence-post like it’s Gandalf’s fucking staff. “I could use it.”

“Yeah, good,” Mike says, regaining some of that certainty he had when they first stepped into the cavern. “We can… we can definitely do this.”

“Sure,” Ben says, glancing markedly to Bev, then ducking his head with a firm nod. “It can’t hurt to try.”

Stan mutters something under his breath, quietly protesting, but moves forward beside Bill with one hand on his knee, ready to follow into the abyss. 

“Just yell at it?” Richie says, hoping his voice sounds more disbelieving than pants-wetting anxious.

“Right,” Bill says, shifting against the rock to where Pennywise is unsubtly waiting for them up the cavern, peeking over it, then looking back over his shoulder with a shaky grimace. “Yeah. You’re g-gr- _great_ at that shit, Trashmouth.”

“Thanks,” Richie mutters, answering with a sneering sort of smile. He feels a tug at his hand and hastily looks sideways, only to see Eddie just wants to share a critical frown. “Okay, Christ. I’ll like _try,_ I promise.”

Mike nods and shuffles forward, trailing his hand against the rock until he’s just behind Stan. He points out, gesturing vaguely, “Okay, I think if some of us go there, then others over – over there, the deadlights can’t – ”

“No, no, I said I still had this!” Eddie interrupts, looking at the rest of them, then back down, breathing in and out a pair off times at steady intervals, sounding remarkably like he’s just gone into labor. “Just like Bev when we were kids, right – I _can_ do this. I can do it.”

Bev clears her throat, her hand raising above her waist. “Eddie – ”

“Do what?” Richie says, only to be slightly jerked into a stumble, unable to hold onto slippery fingers when Eddie abruptly tears out of his handhold and launches past all of them.

“Hey!” Eddie yells, standing out in the open as if he’s been body-snatched, waving the fence post with the evident, insane goal of getting Pennywise’s attention. “You dumbfuck!”

Richie is so stunned he can barely stand to scramble on his knees out from behind the rock, so nearly misses Eddie throwing the fence post like a javelin, driving it right through Pennywise’s face in a place remarkably similar to Eddie’s own injury. It leaves Pennywise shrieking, the noise far more horrifying than when Richie threw the rock, and the deadlights go markedly dim, as if Its concentration has been broken.

“You fool!” Pennywise snarls, scrambling forward, then backward, black blood gushing across Its face and leaking down Its jaw. “You dare?! I am a _god_! I will eat you and then your whole world!”

“You’re nothing!” Mike argues with a shout, bounding out to stand beside Eddie. The two of them hold ground when Pennywise attempts a rush, then when It actually seems taken aback, Mike lifts his chin, bearing a hint of an actual smile across his face. “You’re just another stupid story!”

Richie clambers out behind the rest of the Losers, who all start yelling abuse, but all he really feels like doing is tackling Eddie into the ground – for being crazy, for being so fucking _brave_. He does take a moment to grab Eddie’s hand back, making the first move himself, for once, and squeezes it hard before turning to join the rest of the Losers in trash talking Pennywise.

“You imposter!” Bev shouts, taking steps closer when Pennywise rounds backward into and toward the center of the cavern, as if trying to retreat inside the cradle of erupting stalagmites. “Face stealing crone!”

Pennywise looks back and forth across the group the more insults are thrown, expression curdling in something akin to panic. “You _Losers_ don’t know – !”

“Oh! Sloppy bitch!” Richie shouts to interrupt, lifting his empty hand above his head in triumph and exhaling a pitchy laugh. He tugs earnestly on Eddie’s arm, mostly to annoy him, delighted to get the expected scoff. “That’s what I was going to call It earlier! You fucking sloppy clown _bitch_.”

“You’re nothing but a glorified bug,” Stan shouts, somewhat bafflingly, gesturing upward with a hand as if miming something rising from the ground. “Only surfacing just to eat, you lower lifeform fuck!”

“Eating _kids_!” Bill adds, pounding one hand against the other while jutting his chin out with a sneer. “You couldn’t get real food!? You weak bastard!”

“Lepers and zombies,” Ben shouts, rounding a spike while they follow Pennywise back into the center, one hand steady on the rock. “Can’t you do a real monster? Even your illusions are sickly and weak!”

Richie watches as Pennywise proceeds to literally deflate into the jutting rock, shrinking smaller and smaller with every next insult, until It’s little more than a puddle with a fence post stuck in Its face. He can’t believe it worked, but it also just makes him feel more assured, exhaling a laugh. “Hey, look at those little creepy baby-doll hands, you clown.”

“Oh yuck,” Eddie shoving in next to him, his voice drenched in disgust. “Look at Its head, like fucking putty – fucking _ooblek_.”

Mike goes for Its equally unpleasant heart, visible like a beating drum under the sagging waste of Its body, only for Pennywise to rear up with teeth gnashing toward his hand. He reflexively flinches back, which Eddie promptly takes as an opening to tug his post from Pennywise’s pallid face while It shrieks in pain.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Richie says, as Mike makes a second, more successful go for the heart. “It was kind of bad ass.”

“I didn’t want to not use it!” Eddie says, throwing the post to the side while budging in closer with a flicker of his eyes sideways, catching Richie fast; he smiles slightly, then looks down as they huddle around the heart. “Thanks.”

It feels too easy, almost, literally crushing the heart of a veritable elder god between their bruised and bloody human hands. The remnants float upward, crumbling like ash, and a collective sigh of relief passes through each of the Losers, one to the next, in quiet and desperate celebration; at least, until the cavern starts to fall apart around them.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Eddie, come on,” Bill shouts, spreading his arms and briefly sinking further into the water when his wading is interrupted by it. “You do this every time!”
> 
> Eddie leans forward, then immediately back with a shuffle. “Then you should have fucking expected it!”
> 
> “He’s got a point,” Richie says, looking over his shoulder to catch Bev’s grin with his own. He kicks his legs to float on his back, staring up at Eddie with the same grin, waggling his brows and knowing Eddie with his 20/20 sight can see it perfectly fine.
> 
> “Shut your stupid, smug face, Richie!” Eddie snaps, pulling at the zipper of the hoodie with quick, harried movements, then tugging it off to throw down.
> 
> “Also, every time,” Bill mutters, chin dropping to watch the sewer-soaked hoodie sink into the water.

“I’m not fucking doing this,” Eddie shouts, standing at the top of the quarry while staring at the rest of the Losers down in the water. He points at his cheek with a sharp gesture, shaking his head then looking vaguely away from them. “I have a goddamned open wound and it’s not like diving in this cesspool will get any of _you_ any cleaner.”

“It’s about closing the circle, Eddie,” Mike says, gesturing roundly with his fingers with a twitch of a smirk at the side of his mouth.

“Fuck you and your ritual shit,” Eddie says, pointing downward, and while his voice sharpens, he does seem to be losing ground by the way he takes a step and his other hand drifts to the zipper of the hoodie. “You’ll be making up for that the rest of your goddamn life, which could be literally just the next thirty fucking seconds.”

“Eddie, come on,” Bill shouts, spreading his arms and briefly sinking further into the water when his wading is interrupted by it. “You do this every time!”

Eddie leans forward, then immediately back with a shuffle. “Then you should have fucking expected it!”

“He’s got a point,” Richie says, looking over his shoulder to catch Bev’s grin with his own. He kicks his legs to float on his back, staring up at Eddie with the same grin, waggling his brows and knowing Eddie with his 20/20 sight can see it perfectly fine.

“Shut your stupid, smug face, Richie!” Eddie snaps, pulling at the zipper of the hoodie with quick, harried movements, then tugging it off to throw down.

“Also, every time,” Bill mutters, chin dropping to watch the sewer-soaked hoodie sink into the water.

Eddie follows a few second later, jumping feet first with a small splash and his yellow button down presumably left at the top with the rest of their clothes. He surfaces with a breath and a shudder, hoodie balled up in his hands, which he throws a second time with a splat right into Richie’s face.

Richie makes an act of sinking under the weight, struggling a little more than needed, and laughs just before Eddie dunks him under the water with both hands gripped on his shoulders. He nearly swallows against the water, which he will not be telling Eddie about, and surfaces with a shove back that is barely a touch against Eddie’s obscenely see-through white tank. It’s probably a blessing that his glasses slide off, straight down his nose and into the water with a tame plop.

Richie tries to grab them before they disappear, but without the sound of them against something to help, he’s a little fucked to find them. He dramatically arches his back and rests the back of his hand over his forehead. “I’m blind!”

“Yeah, you fucking are,” Eddie says, thwacking Richie in the chest with a solid thump, then swiftly disappearing under the water. He surfaces a few seconds later, close enough that his legs brush close to Richie’s with every kick. “You mess.”

Richie grins when Eddie slips his glasses onto his face, careful as ever with both hands across the bridge. He reaches up on a nervous whim, briefly taking Eddie’s hands in his with a squeeze. “Thanks.”

Eddie is still for an odd beat, then smiles back, glancing down between them for a moment before he looks back up under his lashes. “No problem.”

Richie exhales an unsteady breath and lets one of his hands slide down Eddie’s forearm to his elbow, releasing the other one to drop between them in the water. He’s pretty sure Eddie moves at the same time, just a bit closer, in a way that has nothing to do with treading the water.

“Did you guys just kiss?” Mike laughs, prompting Richie to jerk back, glancing over his shoulder with a start, only to see that pretty much everyone is facing in a completely different direction.

Oh shit, he means Bev and Ben, which – hah, right. Of course. _Them_.

Richie hastily turns forward just in time to see Eddie’s face twist up in disgust, but he’s not looking at him, he seems to be focusing now on Ben and Bev, too. Richie can hardly believe he’s being upstaged by a fucking amateur poet.

“Do you even care what bacteria in this water?!” Eddie snaps, gesturing at said water with waving hands that splash significantly, most of it, it feels, into Richie’s face. “You definitely swallowed some doing that!”

“Woof,” Richie mocks, but only mostly just to say something while catching Stan’s eye roll.

Bev takes the criticism as a reason to press another kiss across Ben’s mouth, dramatically jumping into him and framing his face with her hands, making him startle into a dazed expression. She looks back over her shoulder to Eddie, then significantly to Richie with a cock of her head and brows raising up her forehead.

“Still gross!” Eddie says, oblivious to the implication, _hopefully_ , which is to be expected, but not particularly encouraging.

Richie swims to the edge of the water, near the shore where Stan has wandered over during the argument, and pulls himself out with a low, exaggerated groan. His whole body is a bruise; he’s going to be hobbling for a week on stage, at least, and probably suffering at least one taunt from Eddie about going rock climbing because now he’s already done it once.

He takes a deep breath, slumping down onto the grass next to Stan; may as well just rip off the band-aid. “So, you’re like married.”

“No,” Stan responds flatly, running a hand through his wet hair in some apparent attempt to neaten the curling strands against his scalp. “I _am_ married, you’re like married.”

Richie rolls his eyes, suffering that now-familiar filter of memories from being a teenager; great, Stan’s been a broken record for thirty years. “Not talking about me, Stan the Man. Are you going to call her?”

“I did,” Stan says, shockingly going with an actual answer.

“You did?” Richie asks, turning his head slightly in a startled blink, then wondering if maybe it was at the Townhouse after he first got settled into his room. Richie thinks _he_ would have done it after _all_ this, when he knew it would be okay. Well, he doesn’t know for sure, but in theory, and if he was married to say… _Eddie_ , he would have – No, no, probably at the airport, _before_ he even left. Fuck.

Stan nods slow, lips briefly rolling together. “While I was…” He looks down at the grass, plucking at a blade. “Cleaning up Bowers.”

“Jesus fuck,” Richie laughs awkwardly, dragging both hands over his face.

“We talked, a little,” Stan continues, adding a few more blades of grass until it’s a pile. “She isn’t happy and doesn’t… _get_ it, but I think she’s relieved I haven’t been secretly agonizing over suicidal thoughts for a while.”

Richie nods heavily, raising his brows at the grass. “Did you mention the clown?”

Stan goes quiet for a few seconds, then exhales hard through his nose while shaking his head, “Just the official story from when we were kids – the whole child killer thing. It’s close enough for now.”

“I’m going to have to remember that cover story,” Richie says, thinking of all the people _he’s_ going to have to lie to about this shitfest.

Stan’s brow furrows deep while he stares at the ground. “When I get home, I – I’m going to talk about It – Pennywise. I don’t like lying to her.”

Richie nods along, preferring not to imagine himself being in that scenario. He thinks whoever it was would just assume it was a really weird bit to hide his trauma, which… It’s definitely going to be something like that, if he works up to telling a therapist about It, rather than dumping it all on Eddie.

“Is it weird?” Stan asks, looking over sideways at Richie with a quirked brow.

Richie blinks back, wondering if he zoned out somewhere in the last few seconds. “What?”

“Eddie being your manager,” Stan says, gesturing out to where Eddie is squawking about Bill splashing at him with both hands. “Now that you remember.”

“No, man,” Richie says, feeling a laugh bubble up at the question, shaking his head while he lets it out at length. “He’s still… It’s not like he’s just part of my job, you know? When we met, he basically… Eddie’d my whole shitty life. Made it better. He’s still just _Eddie,_ Staniel.”

Stan slowly raises an eyebrow, staring hard at Richie with a decidedly odd, pitying sort of disbelief in his eyes. “Did you just _say_ he makes your life better?”

“Yeah? Of course. I think he’s going to take my bullshit less now, though,” Richie says, slumping onto his back in the grass with an exaggerated, lengthy groan. “And he _barely_ put up with it. But now he remembers like _all_ of my most annoying years.”

“I was wondering if you guys argued as much,” Bev says, wringing her hair out and wandering over, slipping down cross-legged into the grass on the other side of Stan. “Before you remembered.”

“I’m always worried they’ll just replace him,” Richie admits, though he knows it’s mostly just a worst case scenario; he’s done a lot he never would have if it weren’t for Eddie, and he knows the agency is aware of it. “Because like with Eddie, they didn’t even ask, so I’m expecting another meeting where they were like ‘here’s Derek – try to avoid making him yell in front of your fans’.”

“I would quit and sign you independently,” Eddie interjects, tugging with pinched fingers at his plastered undershirt while walking up to stand at Richie’s shoulder. “Get the fuck up, you’re going to get bugs.”

Richie slowly spreads his arms out onto the ground; it feels squishy and damp, and he thinks that, _yes_ , there is something crawling on his elbow, but the pinched exasperation on Eddie’s face makes that worth it. “It’s nature, Eds.”

“Do you want a ride back or do you want to walk?” Eddie asks, peering down with a loom and hands on his hips.

“We have to walk anyway,” Richie says, leaning up and putting one hand behind him, forcing himself up from the ground with a groan. “You forgot the car.”

Eddie immediately blanches, his mouth dropping open while he looks up with a start at the edge of the quarry above them. “Oh _shit_.”

“I kind of thought you didn’t want to get it because of the sewer,” Ben says, looking down with a frown while he wrings out the front of his shirt with both hands; the brief peek of his stomach is maybe a little, _entirely_ diverting.

“I wasn’t even thinking about it!” Eddie says, gesturing smally, if aggressively, in front of himself with both hands. “If someone tows it, I’m going to be pissed.”

Mike walks up behind Eddie with a huff through his nose. “Who would tow it?”

“There you go,” Richie says, hooking his arm around Eddie’s shoulder and tugging toward a path he can vaguely remember leading back up to the ridge. “Now, let’s go shower in Stan’s room.”

“Why?” Stan protests, unfolding from the ground with a sharp shake of his head. “The towels just need to be thrown away in yours, you know?”

“That bathroom totally like _traumatized_ us,” Richie says, affecting a deeply exaggerated valley girl Voice and flattening a hand against his heart, leaning forward to look past Eddie just to make dismayed eye-contact with Stan. “We like have to fuck up yours.”

Stan frowns back a beat, then stomps forward to pass by a few steps while lifting a silent middle finger.

The path up into town feels about ten miles longer than it had with bikes and thirty fewer years, but they eventually get their clothes and make it back into Derry, which is either still sleeping or has experienced the rapture. Richie doesn’t remember it being this dead in the early morning when he was a kid, though he’s not sure what time or even what day it is – it _might_ be Friday?

“Hey, look,” Bev says, her hand briefly sweeping in front of Richie, nearly smacking him across the chest. “Is that – ”

Ben makes a startled noise. “Oh, wow.”

Richie peeks over Eddie’s head toward the storefronts, a little curious to see what could be so interesting, only to feel his expression fall at the sight of his reflection in the display window, only not _really_ – it’s a reflection of almost thirty years ago, coke bottle glasses and still hanging off Eddie, who’s got his little fanny pack in the same place as his empty phone holster. The rest of them are there too, staring back while holding bikes, and shit, he’d forgotten how much taller Bill had really been than the rest of them, even Mike, though that hadn’t lasted even to the end of that year.

“How long does that root shit last?” Eddie asks, leaning back to look at Mike with a single narrowed eye.

“Not this long,” Mike says, still staring with soft eyes at the window, then shrugging slightly and looking at Eddie with a small grin. “I think this is just Derry.”

“Great,” Bill says, but he’s smiling, too, when Richie looks over his shoulder at him.

The next store window doesn’t have any visions to share, and the rest of the walk is quiet, if exhausting, every step feeling heavier than the next. The Townhouse looks the same as ever, as they walk up, but when they get in through the door, an actual human attendant stands from a chair at the desk with a smile, greeting them with a firm, welcoming nod, as if they’ve been at all present the last few days.

Richie stares hard while he walks past and up the stairs, waiting for the attendant to turn toothy or offer a sneering smile. The only thing that happens is that they frown a little, hunching into the desk, which probably means that _Richie_ is being the scary one.

The lock is still broken on their door when Richie gets to it, and there are pinkish towels in the tub, so apparently whatever weird _magic_ that was with the storefront window isn’t the useful kind. He watches Eddie shudder at the sight of the towels, expression curling up in disgust, and falls back when Eddie grabs pajamas and his toiletry bag for another trip to Stan’s room.

Richie sighs while digging into his own duffle – he did not bring enough clothes for this detour. He usually manages to fit in laundry at some strange laundromat while listening to Eddie tell him statistics, or hire a service, but Derry has really fucked up his whole tour. He wavers a few moments, or maybe minutes, he’s getting too tired to tell, then pulls out a shirt from the day before yesterday, still mostly clean, and a pair of novelty alien boxers he got as a joke in McCarran at the beginning of the tour.

“Do you guys just want to change rooms?” Stan asks, fingers rubbing at his temple when he opens the door to his room. He looks a little cleaner than he had earlier, in some oversized sweats that scream Hanscom, so he must have fit in a quick shower before Eddie took over. “ _Please_.”

“He has his own sheets on – on the other bed,” Richie says, taking a few steps to lean next to the bathroom door, his face heating a little at just the near slip of _ours_ – he blames teenage Richie for it; forty-year-old Richie doesn’t get shy about that shit. He’s a consummate grown up.

“Oh my god,” Stan says, heartfelt, slumping onto the bed and pressing his forehead into his hands. “It’s like when we had sleepovers.”

“Not at my house,” Richie says, as the memories blend in and he remembers Eddie storming the linen closet while his mom laughed from down the stairs. “He just made me change them. I think Maggie used the same soap.”

Stan doesn’t respond for a beat, just breathing into his hands, then abruptly barks out a loud, startling laugh. “Dumbass.”

Richie blinks a few times, peering down while Stan sits back up.

Stan shakes his head, reaching out and tugging open the drawer next to the bed with a jerk; oh, his phone is in it. He must be telling his –

…Shit, where did Richie leave _his_ phone?

Eddie bursts out of the bathroom in a wash of steam before Richie can really start to panic about that particular detail, aggressively toweling his hair and lowly muttering something that sounds like it’s about hotels. He pauses in front of Richie, opening his mouth, then looks over to Stan while his lips press back into a line. He shakes his head and turns away, stepping toward the door. “I’ll get my first aid kit.”

“Uh,” Richie intones, blinking at the door until it closes behind Eddie.

“Go ahead,” Stan shrugs weakly, gesturing at the bathroom door with a half-hearted lift of his phone. “I get to go for round two of almost getting my face sucked off.”

Richie glances briefly to the door, then back to Stan while letting his eyes trail across his marked-up face and affecting his best Missus K. “You gotta stop giving it away to just anyone who asks, young man.”

Stan rolls his eyes with a grimace at the Voice, then shoos again with a look sideways when the doorknob starts to turn.

Richie takes time to scrub himself in a way that he thinks would even be Eddie-approved, his skin red and raw by the time he steps out from the water. He lingers in front of the sink for a few minutes while running both hands across his face, then reaches out and swipes his hand across the foggy mirror; he looks just about like death warmed over and the way his glasses magnify his eyes do _not_ help. He takes a couple of deep breaths, then starts to get dressed, balling up his ruined clothes into the towel, as if it’ll make any difference.

He finds Eddie still fussing over Stan on the other side of the door, though it’s in a more skillful manner than he had when they were kids. It looks more like Stan has had a couple hundred shaving accidents, rather than that he just got his wisdom teeth yanked out.

“Nice boxers,” Stan greets flatly, peeking for a few seconds around his phone.

Eddie looks backward over his shoulder, just a glance, then turns at the waist in the next moment with a scowl and his eyes landing unsexily on Richie’s alien-covered groin. “Are you fucking serious? You’re wearing unwashed underwear from the _airport_!”

Richie steps backward toward the door, throwing out a pair of finger guns awkwardly around the ball of clothes. “You know it.”

Stan grumbles something low, muttered and unintelligible, just when Richie reaches out to turn the knob at the door.

“Fuck off,” Eddie snaps, less discreet, as the door closes.

Richie throws the dirty clothes into the already ruined bathtub, then shuts the door to hide it, exhaling hard and promptly resolving to forget it for maybe forever. He jumps onto the bed like he had yest– the day _before_ yesterday, covering his face with both arms without even taking his glasses off, trying to expel a lingering dread that won’t fade from the back of his mind. He _knows_ they killed It; he helped crush Its weak little heart, felt it disintegrate against his own fingers… He drags his arms from his face and spreads them across the bed, inhaling and exhaling, as his brain gets fuzzier and fuzzier, until he’s feeling quietly disconnected from the world. It’s not quite sleep, still half aware, breathing somewhere between slumber and waking until he hears the door open and close with a creaky click.

Eddie pauses next to the bed, breaking the quiet with a typical aimless vigor. “Stand up.”

Richie reluctantly peeks open an eye. “That’s what I do.”

“Get _up_ ,” Eddie repeats, his voice more urgent and gesturing with both hands palm up for Richie to move.

Richie exhales heavily and forces himself up, his body feeling even more like a lead weight after a few minutes of dozing. He slumps pointedly after getting upright, waiting for Eddie to inspect the sheets, or whatever, only to startle when Eddie instead yanks him into his arms with a steely grip around his middle.

“Thanks for not dying, dickhead,” Eddie murmurs into Richie’s shirt, fingers twisting tight into the fabric across his shoulder blades.

“Oh,” Richie intones, wrapping his arms around Eddie in return and squeezing, exhaling a breath that feels like it contains multitudes. He drops his head to Eddie’s shoulder, thinking idly about the maze; syncing their breaths to match. “No problem.”

Eddie mumbles something, little more than a breath, to be entirely absorbed by Richie’s shirt. He lifts his head while pulling back, his eyes dark and deep, something inside them that makes Richie forget everything else but a dull hammer inside of his chest; the way heat licks across his skin when he feels what he’s fairly positive is Eddie’s palming firmly at his back. The feeling magnifies when Eddie lifts his chin, lips gently parted and broadcasting a next move that Richie is too scared to – to…

Is that a _ringtone_?

Eddie tragically startles backward, promptly tugging a _phone_ from his pajamas, small and vaguely familiar, but certainly not his usual one. He visibly bites at his lip, glancing back and forth from Richie to it, while it screams at him, then shakes it irritably in his hand while sliding his thumb across the screen. “ _Motherfuck_.”

“Alright, cool,” Richie mutters, feeling severed when Eddie steps back, leaving him cold and no little dissatisfied.

He slumps back down onto the bed, rolling down into the covers this time, then watches Eddie pace out in the hall. He should probably be trying to eavesdrop, as the call likely a hundred percent has to do with him, but… He doesn’t really care. He can’t get out of his head how Eddie had been looking at him, like _he_ was about to do something, but instead he – He just answered the phone.

Eddie shuts the door behind him with a less subtle slam than the first time, rolling the phone over in his hands a few times with a look in his eyes that means whatever he’s saying is probably now being directed at Richie.

Richie should start listening… he knows that he should and that he’s just dragging it out by zoning, but it’s almost soothing just to let the choppy words roll over him like white noise.

“Richard,” Eddie snaps, standing over the bed now with the phone in hand, glaring down Richie with a flat, displeased frown. “Are you even listening? Are you okay for Indianapolis on Sunday – the day after tomorrow? If we leave tonight, we can take a rest day at a real hotel.”

“I’ve just been traumatized,” Richie grumbles, taking off his glasses to cover an eye with the heel of one hand. “We killed a clown. _I_ killed a guy in that bathroom over there like, yesterday, man.”

“So no?” Eddie says, sounding honestly neutral about it, which is weird for him, while he waves the phone.

Richie rolls his head for a beat, then lets his hand fall next to his head to stare blearily at Eddie. “Are we at the train hotel again?”

Eddie exhales hard through his nose. “No.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Richie allows, then lifts his hand to point in Eddie’s face and getting it swatted away. “But I’m going to tell that bit where you made me buy a house for your garage.”

“Oh no,” Eddie says flatly, mouth pursing some while he looks down to tap quickly at the screen. “Not the joke that makes me sound like a competent mechanic.”

Richie huffs slightly, watching for a few seconds again, then focuses on the _phone_. “Where’d you get that?”

“What?” Eddie asks, spreading his arms and blinking down at himself, as if Richie might mean his boring black t-shirt.

“That?” Richie says, reaching up and tapping at the back of it between Eddie’s fingers. “It’s like, ancient.”

Eddie frowns hard enough that Richie can see it without his glasses, as if he’s not sure if he’s supposed to be reacting to a bad joke. “It’s my backup. I keep it activated in case I lose my main one.”

“I can’t believe…” Richie snorts and it becomes a laugh, until he’s grinning weakly at the ceiling. “You’re so _prepared_ , Eds.”

Eddie exhales hard, dropping the phone to the side table with a clunk. “We left ours in the car – ”

“Oh, thank fuck,” Richie mutters, a little tight feeling at the corner of his mind disappearing. He still doesn’t know what to do with his hands, but at least some kid in three years isn’t going find his dead phone in the Barrens and release all his embarrassing photos of Eddie doing sexy things like standing next to lamp posts or scowling at venue signs.

“ – So I’m lucky to have it,” Eddie says tapping at the light to turn it out, then turning his head to the light bleeding through the thin curtains from the morning outside. He throws the comforter somewhat aggressively, likely scowling, “Jesus. My whole circadian rhythm is fucked in the ear.”

Richie snorts some, closing his eyes, idly memorizing this feeling of how the bed shifts while he knows it’s Eddie on the other side. It’s a depressing as fuck practice, made worse by how it’s almost a habit; he can remember doing it as a teenager with ideas of a fantastical future that he knew, even then, would never, ever happen for him.

“You know what I realized, earlier, in the Barrens?” Eddie says, his voice strangely light in a way that sounds particularly, incongruously forced. “Unless you’ve got some kind of a double life, you haven’t been with _anyone_ since Cam.”

Oh great, they all just heroically slayed _the_ Killer Klown from Outer Space, and Eddie has decided to one up It on being goddamn terrifying.

“So?” Richie says, opening his eyes and staring blearily at what he _hopes_ is big crack in the ceiling that’s been badly plastered over in the wrong color paint.

“ _So_ ,” Eddie exhales hard, his tone swiftly shedding whatever indifference it held before; he actually sounds strangely angry, but he also sounds like that a lot. “Why haven’t you been – ?”

“Because I just haven’t,” Richie interrupts, maybe a little too loud for the relative quiet between them, but he _cannot_ have this conversation. He wants to end it there, with some semblance of a neutral position, but instead his filter, as usual, refuses to function. “And like, man, now that I remember being a kid, I know I’ve got everything I ever dreamed of, you know? I don’t – I’ve got all I need.”

“You’re not a kid anymore, Rich,” Eddie says quietly, his words slow but not particularly patient. “What about what you want _now_?”

Richie has no clue what he wants now – three days ago, he _had_ been coming up on the five-year anniversary of imagining a neurotically micromanaged wedding where he wore a Hawaiian shirt next to a white-suited Eddie on a beach, he always imagined a beach, but now… Eddie is one of his be all, end all best friends. He knew him when he was eight and thirteen and seventeen and thirty-five, and he is as totally and completely untouchable now as he was the first time Richie loved him. “It’s… still the same, really: big Hollywood house, red sports car, loads of cash, and Eddie Kaspbrak forced to admit that I’m funny.”

Eddie exhales hard, his fist jabbing up against Richie’s hip. “You almost fucking died _,_ didn’t that give you any goddamn perspective? Isn’t there anything you want to – to _do_?”

“I’m good, Eds,” Richie says, pretty sure that his voice is sincere; it’s what he’s best at, sounding like something he isn’t. “Like I said, I have everything I could want right here.”

Eddie doesn’t ask more, and consequently the silence slowly, surely settles uncomfortably between them. “Fuck this,” he abruptly snarls, shifting on the bed and against Richie’s side while he sits up. “You better not sue me for harassment.”

“I’d never – ” Richie says, only to startle when a fingers wrap around his jaw and force him to look sideways, making him stare directly at Eddie’s pinched frown, crystal clear, even without his glasses, being barely an inch away. “Eds?” He says, bemused and feeling his face start to heat with a flush, heart thumping against his ribs. “Eddie Spaghetti?”

“Do you know why I grew the beard?” Eddie asks, a little too serious for the strangeness of the question.

Richie swallows hard, but it just makes it worse as his throat bobs up against Eddie’s fingers. “No?”

Eddie’s eyes narrow, fingers loosening slightly across Richie’s skin. “You said Steve looked hot with one.”

Richie cannot even remember the last time he saw Steve. “I did?”

“You did,” Eddie says, leaning in closer and nearly pressing their foreheads together. “You said – ” His voice pitches into his deeply unflattering imitation of Richie, “You know, Eds, I’ve always been into short men with beards.”

Richie swallows again, blinking a few times. Drunk Richie is such a total dickhead; he also, apparently, can get away with calling Eddie short.

“And, you know, I’ve been waiting for you to make a move?” Eddie says, quietly getting worked up in the form of a raspy voice and his hand tightening in a way that probably shouldn’t be so hot. “Especially after that – I didn’t want to first, because… because I am a professional, I’m not going to make you feel pressured when I control your _job_ , I’m not a piece of shit. But you never did a fucking thing while _sober_. So I thought, maybe I’m just projecting, because I’ve wanted it so bad.”

“Oh?” Richie intones, though it sounds more like a squeak.

“But then today, you get all up in my fucking face, calling me pretty while we’re high, saying I’m brave after I almost let you _die_ ; you hold my fucking hand while we murder a monster, then tell Stan I make your _life_ better?” Eddie may as well be counting off a list of mortal sins for how he says every example. “And I realized… I realized you’ve been into me the whole fucking time, haven’t you? I didn’t need to do shit about how I looked.”

The proceeding silence draws out into minute or more, and Richie belated realizes that he’s actually supposed to answer. “You’re kind of putting me on the – ”

Eddie practically looms, palm flattening on his chest. “ _Richie_.”

“Fuck you, _yes_ ,” Richie says, pulling away and rolling over to shove his face into the pillow while refusing to look at Eddie’s surely ambiguous scowl. “I even – ” He gestures with a hand wrapped around an imaginary knife, “Carved it into the goddamn Kissing Bridge.”

“You – ” Eddie practically starts to sputter, quickly sounding bewildered. “You what? _When_?”

Richie shrugs weakly, crowding his head further into his arms. “That summer.”

“That sum – when we were _thirteen_?” Eddie clarifies, his voice pitching high in plain shock.

Richie shrugs again and thinks he might just have a stroke.

“Holy _shit_ , I want to say I wish you’d said something, back then, because I fucking do, but it – It wouldn’t have fucking mattered would it!?” Eddie says, smoothly transitioning into a new rant in the way only he can, but nowhere is it close to the one that Richie had expected. “We would’ve left Derry and just forgot! Our whole goddamn lives, poof, don’t get to remember that shit, do we?! _Fuck_.”

Richie turns his head, peeking over his elbow to watch Eddie bark at the ceiling in full Technicolor.

“Like what the fuck could have happened if I – ” Eddie takes a deep breath, then another, ostensibly trying to calm himself down, but it works about as well as it usually does with him. “And then if we hadn’t even fucking _met_ in LA? Would you still be telling some other jackass’ jokes in the closet? Could _I_ be in the closet – could I have married…? _Oh god_ , we could’ve had a whole fucking _thing_ in high school, but then our lives still could’ve sucked so fucking bad because of that stupid fucking clown. It could be so much _worse_.”

“I guess?” Richie agrees, he doesn’t want to think about what his life would be like, or how it probably _would_ still be the same as it was before the agency gave him Eddie. “At least you might never have slept with that scruffy bum who totally had crabs.”

“He didn’t have crabs, shut up,” Eddie says, his hand making contact with Richie’s side, then staying there, warm and solid, until he weakly smacks a second time. “Was that a joke about the beach, you piece of shit?”

“I’m really tired,” Richie admits, but it was still pretty good; he hopes he remembers it for when he turns this slightly painful, very personal conversation into a bit.

“Christ,” Eddie exhales hard, then abruptly he rolls over closer, poking Richie hard in the ribs and distractingly pressed up against his side from shoulder to knee. “He – he reminded me of you, you know, so you’re just insulting yourself.”

“Did I say bum?” Richie says, turning over onto his side again, then reaching up and dragging the side of his hand down his own chest where a shirt lapel might lay. “I meant beach liege. A king _of_ crabs.”

Eddie huffs slightly, nearly a laugh, which really does make Richie feel like a king. He shifts even closer, elbow landing on Richie’s shoulder and hand against his jaw a second time, and the way he leans down now is far less accusatory, almost tender, only for him to abruptly push back away. “Are you going to throw up if I kiss you?”

Richie stares for a beat, and maybe his stomach is rolling _a little_ , but fuck Eddie. Literally. “Asshole.”

Eddie snorts lightly, leaning down again, and then his mouth is pressed softly to Richie’s; a little chapped, a little tentative, but the fact it’s him is all that could ever matter.

It’s the culmination of two lives’ fantasies and Richie’s almost delirious enough to worry it’s not happening at all, quiet as it is, simply laying together on an uncomfortable hotel mattress. He presses a hand up against Eddie’s side, molding it tight against the curve of his ribs, and it’s both the same and so, so different than every time he’s crafted some reason to do it at an event or just moving around him. He can hold on this time, no longer covet a fleeting moment, and joyously counts the heartbeats that speed up against his palm.

Eddie turns his head and shifts slightly, pulling his mouth away to presses it to the side of Richie’s lips, then higher up his jaw. His fingers trace across the other side of Richie’s cheek, up around his eye, then over his ear, light, and not exactly teasing, but simply present.

“I think you’re my soul mate,” Richie whispers, then immediately regrets it, because holy shit could he come off as any more clingy? Only yeah, he definitely could, since his immediate thoughts to follow are: I fell in love with you twice; I’ve want to get married since we met; I have a reoccurring fantasy where we just fucking cuddle.

“Fuck, Rich,” Eddie says, his voice creaky, hand wrapping firm and warm around Richie’s nape while he whispers straight into his mouth. “I really hate that goddamn clown.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, knowing he’s not being all that subtle while tugging Eddie a little further on top of him.

“That mother _fucker_ ,” Eddie says, voice rising again, as he somewhat tragically moves up on Richie’s chest and a little away to fuzzily sneer into the darkness. “That painted fucking asshole with his creepy goddamn act – he deserved worse! He stole our _lives_ ; imagine how much more successful would you’d be if I’d been managing you since the beginning?”

Richie can’t help but crack up a little, shoving his grin up into Eddie’s collarbone. He’s always loved this theatrically peeved Eddie, the way his expression just tightens and tightens, and even more now he knows he has been conditioned to basically since birth.

A door slams in the hall, followed by stomping footsteps, and soon their broken door is shoved open, so Stan can poke his head in with a scowl. “You guys realize everyone else is trying to sleep.”

“Fuck off, Stan,” Eddie snaps, twisting to look around with his little snarl, one hand fixed at the center of Richie’s chest. “We’re working through shit.”

“Do it quieter,” Stan says firmly, yanking the door back closed with an exacting finality.

Richie exhales a skittering sort of laugh, feeling teenaged and caught, but this time he’s actually making out with Eddie like he always wanted, and Stan is… Well, Stan. He never liked it when they got too loud. He’d taken his sleepovers on the couch, more than once, just to avoid listening to them.

“Damn it,” Eddie says, abruptly rolling out of the bed, and leaving Richie cold and a little disoriented. A zipper is heard being pulled, then the smack of something on the floor – fuck, is he getting _dressed_? “I’m going for a run.”

“What?” Richie says, wanting to reach out, but he’s suddenly too exhausted to move. He’s a little worried Eddie may have literally stolen all of his energy; he was straight up _ready_ to bone down not even two seconds ago.

“If I don’t, I’m really going to start screaming, alright?” Eddie says, his fuzzy form moving around in the dim light; he’s probably pulling on that pair of knee-length joggers that have always looked ruthlessly cute on him.

Richie is going to imagine that, anyway, because he’s too lazy to get his glasses. “I was kind of going for that?”

“Shut up,” Eddie hisses, standing from presumably pulling on shoes. He approaches the bed again, and for half a desperate second it almost seems like he might get in, but then all he does is run his hand through Richie’s hair. “Get some sleep.”

Richie watches Eddie’s dark shape leave, then exhales a low, long whine. He slumps over onto his side, maybe a little too close to Eddie’s pillow, and resolves to stay awake around the same time he stops thinking much of anything at all. He wakes later to a creak of the door and a near-heart attack, flashes of mutated pomeranians and bloody what-ifs behind his eyes, only to see Eddie slipping back into the shadowed room. He briefly glances to the curtains and the light behind them, then jumps slightly when _his phone_ lands across his hand on the pillow. He can’t quite find the energy to grab it, barely has enough to connect the dots that Eddie must’ve gotten paranoid about the car, so just turns his head to watch him, visibly more exhausted, clumsily grab more clothes and stumble into the bathroom.

The sound of water never comes, instead just a quiet sort of squeak, then Eddie darting back out while pulling his shirt off from the door to the bed. “Fuck, forgot about the fucking – _fuck_ ,” he grumbles, eyes dark but still gleaming in the dim light peeking through the curtains. “ _Sorry_ , I shouldn’t have… done that – _gone_ , I’m just… I’m so fucking angry. At this whole shithole town.”

“ ‘s cool, Spaghedsie,” Richie says, tucking his nose into Eddie’s bare shoulder even while an elbow meets his sternum. He makes a point to pat at his flat stomach as slow and condescending as possible, simultaneously copping about thirty years’ worth of feel. “At least you got the Caddy.”

“Shut up,” Eddie mutters, tucking his head and breathing soft against Richie’s hair, words already slurring with sleep. “Some dumbass would – would’ve fuckin’… joyrided in it.”

* * *

Richie wakes to quiet murmurs in the hall and a numb arm, courtesy of a star-fishing bed partner shoving him to the edge of the mattress. He stares blearily for a few minutes, tracing with unfocused eyes over Eddie’s gently furrowed brow to his slack lips, down across his jaw and along his collarbones, absorbing the sight until he’s satiated for at least the next few minutes. He turns and reaches blindly for his reclaimed phone, swiping away numerous messages, only to pause at a picture text from hours before from _Eddie_ – the little thumbnail of a plank of wood damning. He unlocks the screen with a swallow, then enlarges the picture, staring at the faded initials with a tight feeling spooling beneath his sternum.

He does his best to blink away a sudden stinging at the edge of his eyes, dropping the phone again while turning to reach out for Eddie. He hesitantly palms his arm, squeezing, but that doesn’t get much of a reaction, so slips his fingers down, skidding his fingertips across exposed ribs, and huffs to himself when Eddie unconsciously recoils with the cutest whine in the universe. Richie prods again, just a little firmer, until Eddie’s brows are furrowing tight, mouth pinching, as he wakes to the treatment.

“Stop,” Eddie grumbles, turning away and curling up like a disturbed little pill bug. “F’ck off.”

Richie shifts in closer and rubs his forehead against Eddie’s turned shoulder, feeling bold while sliding an arm around his waist. “No.”

Eddie mumbles something incomprehensible, then wraps his hand around Richie’s at his waist and squeezes together his fingers. “Go ‘sleep.”

“Kissing Bridge is like miles from here,” Richie whispers, because Eddie had just run there last – _this_ morning, when he should have been, at the very _least_ , passed out after a full night of clown murder; he had gone and taken a picture of the physical embodiment of Richie’s enduring teenage crush. “You fucking weirdo.”

Eddie hums low and contrary. “Jus’ two.”

Richie grunts slightly in question, digging his chin harder into Eddie’s arm.

“Two miles,” Eddie says, lashes shifting with movement under his closed eyes. “Wanted to see.”

Richie strokes his thumb against the skin under his hand, taking a moment to be grateful that he can even do it, then huffs and tucks in closer around Eddie to set his lips just next to his ear. “ _Loser_.”

Eddie responds with a mumble, turning his head into the pillow to better expose his bearded jaw.

Richie hesitates only a beat before pressing his lips firm against the bone, once, then again further down against the softer skin. He’s careful around the edges of the bandage, avoiding thinking about the unpleasant damage underneath, instead concentrating on dropping kisses down Eddie’s face.

“That’s good,” Eddie mutters, budging backward until his bare back is flush to Richie’s chest, solid and warm, fitting soundly against him. “ _Richie_.”

Richie feels a little bit like he must still be dreaming, his cock filling while he feels down Eddie’s torso. He uses his other hand to press up against Eddie’s back, mapping out every dip of muscle and bone that flexes with hitching breath that’s his to cause. He rocks forward on mostly reflex, heat flushing up his neck when it earns him a murmur of vague praise, and swallows hard while hesitantly dipping his fingers under the loose waistband of Eddie’s pants.

Eddie rolls his hips into the movement, inhaling deep, then abruptly stiffens in a mildly alarming manner, as his hand squeezes again around Richie’s fingers – this time in a warning. “We don’t have a bathroom.”

Richie exhales a grumble that is probably more of a whine. “But you’re hard, too.”

“No shit,” Eddie mutters, grip relaxing to pet coyly at Richie’s knuckles while he turns his head into the pillow with a sigh. “Got a good place in Indy – two shower heads.”

“Oh,” Richie says, blinking quick a few times, then feeling a grin grow across his face and pressing it into Eddie’s shoulder. “ _Oh_ , you planned all this, you micromanaging minx.”

Eddie hums lowly, pitching in some vague disagreement, but otherwise unapologetic. “Just hoped. Like you with all those nice dinners at fancy places, I’m guessing.”

Richie huffs through his nose, pressing his mouth to Eddie’s neck. “I still kind of counted them as dates.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees, rolling his head into the attention with a sigh, reaching up to slip his hand into Richie’s hair. He goes quiet for a few seconds, petting at Richie, then clears his throat. “Remember the Addams Family?”

“I mean, which – ” Richie takes a sharp breath, pressing in closer and palming impatiently at Eddie’s chest while the realization goes through him like a bolt of lightening. “No way, Eds. Was _that_ your first date?”

Eddie sighs heavily, as if put out, but there’s a curl at the visible edge of his mouth. “Get over it.”

“I can’t,” Richie says, feeling like throwing open a window crowing to the sky outside – Katy and her Ferris wheel can fucking eat shit. “Was I a better hand-holder?”

Eddie snorts softly, shifting bodily until his other hand is threading through Richie’s, still on his hip, his thumb squeezing a little too hard into Richie’s knuckles. “Until you said it was a fucking _accident_.”

“I mean…” Richie slumps and groans into Eddie’s shoulder, a little put-out that he has to defend a stupid teenager from twenty years ago; he wants to live in the moment, preferably this moment, where Eddie is half-naked and turning his head to kiss at his forehead. “It _was_? I didn’t mean to really do anything. You were just dressed up all nice and wearing my own shitty cologne – my brain got all confused about who I ought to want and who I really did, then suddenly I was grabbing you.”

Eddie hums low and taunting, fingers drifting out of Richie’s hair and down his jaw. “You should hold onto that memory, since the jeans I was going to wear to l’Artusi are now trash – _thanks,_ dickhead.”

“Shit, you were really hot in them,” Richie says, recalling the sight of Eddie in front of the mirror, shirtless with the waistband sitting low against his hips. He frowns slightly, realizing something about the scold is a little troublingly omniscient, even coming from Eddie. “How do you know I made the reservation there?”

“I have your calendar, Rich,” Eddie says, his tone baffled before it breaks into a more confident crack of a laugh. “Did you fucking forget? Use a different email, maybe.”

“Shit,” Richie mumbles, curling inward and digging his forehead hard into Eddie’s shoulder blade with a groan; he’s officially been boner-killed. He cannot even imagine how many tables for two that he’s gotten, date-like, and Eddie knows he was _all_ of them; Richie couldn’t have lied about his dating life if he had tried.

Eddie reaches back, patting him on the hip in a way that is entirely condescending.

“You think Stan is up yet?” Richie asks, resigned to his waning arousal and rolling onto his back.

“You know what?” Eddie says, exhaling a huff and cruelly pulling away, climbing out of the bed to leave Richie alone under the covers. “I hope he isn’t.”

Richie shifts further up the bed, reaching out for his glasses, and lifts an eyebrow when Eddie picks up his entire suitcase, pretty clearly broadcasting that he’s going to be making an obnoxious move with it. The way he marches out the door is like a soldier on a mission, and the abrupt slap of the hard plastic against Stan’s door is so loud it sounds like a gunshot down the hall.

“Jesus fuck, Kasbrak,” Stan says, only a few seconds later, his voice annoyed and distinctly groggy; it fades when then door closes, ongoing, but no longer intelligible.

“I don’t give a shit,” Eddie says, his voice, on the other hand, echoing actually _really_ clear from the other side of the wall; the whole lot of the Losers definitely heard him ranting this morning. “I got eight hours, which means you definitely did.”

Richie laughs aloud, hoping Eddie can hear it, and starts to get ready for the day; the night; the flight. He has _no clue_ what’s going to happen until Sunday’s sound check, but hopes dearly it will involve those two showerheads.

“ _Both_ of you have shitty taste in men,” Stan says, pausing to glower into Richie’s door with a deep frown.

“Ouch,” Richie says, offering an exaggerated pout while zipping up his jeans from the day before last. “That’s not a nice thing to say about your mom.”

Stan exhales heavily, shaking his head before continuing down the hall. “And the point is made.”

Richie follows Stan down to find the rest of the Losers already loitering in the lobby, spread out across the chairs and leather loveseats. “I guess I’m going to Indianapolis,” he announces, leaning into the bannister while making a point to keep a step above the rest of the Losers. He gestures in what is probably not the actual direction of the Midwest, but could be. “If anyone wants to see a show, I’m planning to improv this next one and make it about how Eddie bullies me.”

“Isn’t it already mostly about him?” Bev says, looking up with a keen smirk.

“ _Hah_ ,” Richie says, leaning forward while setting his elbow on the bannister, rubbing his fingers and thumb together. “Pay me and find out.”

“Tonight?” Ben says, his adorable face scrunching up with a slightly guilt-inducing disappointment.

Richie drops his hand with a weak shrug, wishing he still had his jacket to shrink into for such moments of… pure awkward. “It’s a whole shitty thing for me to cancel shows this big – not to brag, but also: _to brag_.”

“I have to leave tonight, too,” Stan says, clearing his throat slightly and tipping his head with a marked glance at an empty corner. “Obviously.”

“Me, too,” Bill says, rocking a few times on his feet while bringing a hand up to scratch at the back of his neck with a resigned smile. “Audra convinced the director this was s-some kind of finding my roots muse thing and – and I sh-should keep to that for her.”

“Oh right, you were on a movie set,” Mike says, leaning against the arm of his chair with a smile. “That’s cool.”

“Do you want to come?” Bill asks, head popping up and wearing a startlingly urgent expression. “I – I’m sure Audra would l-love to have you.”

“Uh,” Mike intones, visibly startled, briefly peeking around at the other Losers before focusing back on Bill. “I have to, uh – resign from the library. After maybe?”

Bill nods a few times, only a little visibly put out. “It’s not what it’s cracked up to be – I’m sure Richie and Eddie would say the same.”

“And the people in the room next to them,” Stan says flatly, glancing pointedly to the side.

“Or below them,” Ben says softly, grinning slightly, though his eyes sweep down self-consciously while he says it.

Richie leans forward on the bannister, sweeping his finger back and forth; it’s nice he doesn’t have to go through the awkward, scarring experience of announcing this development, but also: “I’ll have you chucklefucks know that all we’ve done is _cuddle._ ”

“Aw,” Bev says, reaching out with a hand to pat condescendingly on Richie’s bicep. “That’s cute. _Sad_ , but cute.”

“Maybe stop arguing,” Bill suggests, his voice thinning out toward the middle when a door is heard closing above them.

Richie pretends to think for a minute, then shakes his head. “Just can’t be done.”

“I chartered the plane for eight,” Eddie says, descending the stairs with his Samsonite clanking all the way down, holding it with both hands in a way that is both super dorky and painfully cute. He’s wearing the bright red bomber jacket, which promptly rockets up to the top of Richie’s outfit ranking. “So we can get dinner first. Go get your bag.”

“Chartered it?” Bill repeats, a single, incredulous brow going up his forehead; his eyes follow Richie while he dutifully moves to go back up to the stairs for his duffle. “Do you have a _private_ plane?”

“Nah, Eddie is blackmailing the agency somehow,” Richie says, then pauses at the landing between the two flights of stairs to whisper loudly behind his hand. “I don’t mind commercial.”

“It’s _disgusting_ ,” Eddie says, his bag dropping to the ground with a thunk onto the wood floor of the lobby. “And he generates enough revenue to earn it.”

“He means he does,” Richie clarifies with a yell down the center of the stairs, turning away from the bannister and into their room. He huffs a laugh when he sees his bag is all packed up and sitting centered on the bed; okay, Indianapolis is going to go _great_.

Mike convinces Eddie to go to the old diner, which has gone through something of an unsettling makeover since 1994 – from old because it’s still Fifties, to _new_ because it’s pretending to be Fifties. It’s got more seating, at least, so no one has to sit awkwardly at the end of the booth, instead being seated at a table that they can actually fit in.

“I would like all of the bacon and eggs that you have,” Richie announces, pushing his offered menu to the side, when the waitress attempts to hand it to him; her expression says that this is not the first time she’s been given this order. He sighs heavily, put upon, “Two eggs, over easy, bacon and hashbrowns.”

The majority of the Losers order a similar breakfast for dinner, except Ben, who bravely orders the meatloaf, and Mike, who only orders berry pie. His face when their orders arrive is practically adulating, taking the pie from the waitress with careful hands and a steady exhale, looking at the rest of them like they should begging for a bite.

“Looks good?” Stan offers, one of his brows rising high into his forehead while his fork keeps hovers over his plate.

“It’s delicious,” Mike says, taking his first bite with a vaguely awkward moan, then going for the next with a solid nod. “I’m going to buy six for when I drive to Florida.”

Bev snorts lightly, digging into her scrambled eggs with a shake of her head.

The conversation blends into a low rumble of equally innocuous topics; the sorts of things they should have talked more about at the Jade of the Orient, though the tension does bounce between Stan saying supremely boring things about numbers to Bev awkwardly talking around her plans for after her divorce. A familiar buzzing interrupts the truly mind-numbing interest Bill has in adapting for the stage rather than the screen, as Eddie’s phone tries to vibrate off the table in the vague opening of _Self Esteem_.

Eddie takes a huffy, irritated breath, then grabs it from the table with a swipe across the screen. “ _What_ , Rog?” he snaps into the phone, giving Richie a look that generally means Roger is about to get fired for nth time. He stands up from the table after a few seconds nattering into his ear, face practically all furrow, and turns around to make the condemning move of _taking it outside_. “Excuse me, that sounds more like you can’t do your fucking job? I’m trying to eat, shit head!”

The waitress, holding their check, gives a wide berth, lingering back a distinct few yards while Eddie sweeps past her on his way the small entryway. She waits until Mike gestures for her to come forward, lifting a hand with crooked fingers and an easy smile.

“It’s just how you’re going to fucking spin it! Everyone knows it’s – ” Eddie’s voice cuts off, as the glass door closes behind him, but a quick peak toward the window illustrates exactly how the conversation is playing out.

“I can’t believe he’s still like that,” Stan says, heel of his hand pressing into a tired eye while he stabs at the remains of his hash browns.

Bill snatches at the check before anyone else can even try, pulling out his card, reminding Richie that he had been noticeably put out at the Jade of the Orient. It’s tempting to bring up that this isn’t even a comparison, just to get a rise out of him, but even _more_ tempting, Richie thinks, as he pulls out his phone, is to text Eddie the idea to show Bill up at a future dinner where he _can’t_ take the check.

“I was just thinking the same,” Bev says, laughing slightly into the back of her hand, peering out the window to unashamedly watch Eddie make an example of himself. “Where does he get the energy?”

“A grip once asked if he had any Adderall handy,” Richie says, shoving half a fried egg onto the last piece of toast from Eddie’s plate. “He totally flipped.”

“Does this joke have layers,” Ben asks, raising an eyebrow with a smile curling at the corner of his mouth. “Because you have a prescription?”

“Haystack, you clever boy,” Richie says, pointing with his toast and nearly losing a precious crispy edge when he diverts to point at his hip. “But no, I actually use Daytrana, which is basically a sticker for my brain. The spicy gauc of this joke is that _he_ _does_.”

“Christ, that explains so much,” Bill mutters, brows slowly going up while he signs the check.

“Just wait until you see him after like two doppios and a Red Bull,” Richie says, leaning back to check the window again, confirming that the conversation has wound down now that most of the gesturing is smally at the ground.

“Do we want to?” Mike says, bemused, maybe a little apprehensive.

“What the hell is a doppio?” Stan asks, blinking back steadily from the other side of the booth, uncowed by the threat.

“Pure espresso,” Richie says, gagging a little exaggeratedly, but considering the memory of the _singular_ time he’d jokingly downed one before Eddie could get to it, entirely appropriate. “They come in this tiny cup that he downs like a slippery nipple.”

The table groans, admirably in unison, and it’s punctuated by a smack across Richie’s shoulder from somewhere behind him.

“It’s a drink,” Eddie says, reaching down to the back of his chair to grab the jacket across it, then pulling it over his shoulders. “Well, it’s been fucking shitty, guys, honestly, but we have to go.”

“Already?” Richie whines, shoving slowly away from the table with only a slide of his feet. He stands with a grumble and shoves into Eddie’s space, leaning down to pout into his shoulder. “Five more minutes.”

“Text us,” Eddie says, putting his hand up in Richie’s face and pushing him away by the forehead. “I already subscribed you all to Richie’s podcast.”

“Oh,” Mike says, quirking an eyebrow and glancing down to his face-down phone on the table. “ _That’s_ why you took our phones last night?”

“Seriously, Eddie?” Bev says, laughing, standing up from her chair with a broadcasted attempt for a hug.

“I’m good at my job,” Eddie says, returning the hug, which seems to set everyone off as the table is swiftly vacated to pile on Eddie in turns. He acts like it’s perfunctory, every single one, but the color of his face has turned a deep, rosy pink. “I, uh, I’m going to go fill the car up, Rich, and you need to call Roger. I’ll be across the street.”

“Alright,” Richie says, promptly diving for Ben first, clutching him at the shoulders for a bear hug, because he looks the least ready and most sturdy for it. “Give your Trashmouth some sugar.”

He doesn’t expect to get much out of the joke, but everyone steps forward to squeeze him tight around the middle, even Stan, who pretends like it’s all a huge trouble, despite being the one who stepped forward in the first place. It’s not a _shock_ , exactly, he knows how much they all mean to each other, especially now, but it’s probably the most honest, careless affection from a whole group that he’s had since he was with the same people.

“Richie,” Stan gripes, when Richie holds on for a good thirty seconds too long, pushing away with his face like that of a wet cat.

“Text me, asshole,” Richie says, backing off while pointing with two fingers and an imploring tilt of his head. “I want to hear about your exotic travels in Buenos Aires.”

Stan smiles briefly, huffing a laugh, then shakes his head while effecting an annoyed look. “Definitely never meeting my wife.”

“I promise I’ll be cool,” Richie swears, only lying a little bit while putting his hand across his heart, then dropping it with a gesture of his thumb at the table. “I’ve met Bill’s wife, you know.”

“She’s never… mentioned you,” Bill says, sitting back down with a small smirk. His expression softens a beat later, to something more thoughtful, and he looks back up to make eye-contact. “Eddie, though; did he once yell at a bartender about s-soap spots on a glass – something about chemicals?”

Richie presses his lips together for a beat. “Yes.”

Bill huffs through his nose. “Then she remembers _him_.”

“Make sure to text when you get to Bangor, okay?” Bev says, reaching out and squeezing at Richie’s arm, then pulling him in abruptly for another hug. She tucks into his shoulder, not quite whispering, but soft and heartfelt. “We’re not going to forget you guys, again.”

“Okay,” Richie says, swallowing hard and briefly clutching at her jacket. He takes a breath and pulls away, glancing between the rest of the Losers with a deep breath. “We won’t forget either.”

“That would suck, especially for you,” Stan says, pointedly raising his brows while sitting back down in front of his remaining coffee. “Or not suck, really.”

Richie has a laugh startled out of him, feeling his face heat while he stumbles back away from the table. “Shut up, Urine. Don’t be a green-eyed bitch.”

“I could not be any less jealous,” Stan says, gesturing for Richie to get moving without looking, picking up his coffee with his other hand while the Losers laugh around him.

Richie manages to suppress another comment behind an exaggerated, honking laugh, turning around on his heel while ignoring a little yank in his gut to go back to the table; he’ll see them again, and hopefully somewhere less shitty. He unlocks his phone just outside the door into diner entrance, taking a deep breath before pressing Roger’s name in his contacts. “Please don’t answer.”

Roger picks up after an excruciating five rings, cruelly destroying Richie hope for voicemail. “This is Roger Mertin.”

“Hey, Rabbit,” Richie says, kicking at the door jamb of the diner with an exaggerated miss.

“Oh shit, Richie,” Roger says, quiet for a beat, then voice fading for a few seconds while he talks to someone about what is clearly the temperature of his coffee order. He clears his throat when he brings the phone back up to speak into it. “Hey, I didn’t expect you to call.”

“I was told to,” Richie says, looking across the street and catching Eddie, as promised, at the Citgo with the Cadillac. “Figured I’d listen this once.”

Roger exhales a crack of laughter. “So your man told you to? You’re so whipped.”

Richie blinks a few times, a flush crawling up from his neck to his scalp as he realizes why Eddie might’ve wanted him to make this call. “You know, uh, speaking of… Did Eddie mention anything about, uh, _us_ when he talked to you this morning?” He asks, because he can kind of _get_ Eddie mentioning it to Roger, as some preparation for a future publicity nightmare? Granted, if he didn’t… Richie just did, so hopefully Eddie will be alright with it. _Shit_. “Is that why he wanted me to call?”

“Why, did you two get engaged or something?” Roger asks, voice dropping and not sounding particularly like he’s joking; in fact, he sounds genuinely a little _annoyed_. “Is _that_ what you ran off to do?”

Richie pauses mid-step, staring hard at a cracked line on the sidewalk. “You already think we’re together?”

“Am I not supposed to?” Roger says, punctuated by the hissing spray of a steam wand behind him, before the sound fades while he presumably walks back from it. “I mean, I know your official line is that it’s a rumor, yeah, but everyone knows, Rich. Like on the planet. You call him in the middle of every episode of your weird creepy podcast just to flirt.”

“Oh,” Richie intones, tipping his head slightly and resuming his path to the other side of the street. “That’s true.”

“Like, do you guys not talk? Because I would say – ” Roger’s voice drops into that insufferable, self-superior tone. “It definitely became more of an _open_ secret after you took him to the Grifters premiere, when Mellie asked if there was going to be an issue with you two being out,” he says, just gliding over the fact that he thinks Richie brought Eddie to that as a date, which it had been, but only in Richie’s head, kind of like all the other premiers, except apparently also to a lot of other people – maybe even Eddie, if what he said earlier is to be believed. “Like, in terms of privacy, you know, if your relationship ever went public? And Edward just said it wouldn’t be. Or not to worry about it? I’m not sure the exact words.”

Richie stares at Eddie across the street, leaning against the car with one hand responsibly curled around the dispenser. “Did he?”

“Yeah?” Roger says, his voice lifting up at the end of the word, distinctly mocking. “Kind of thought maybe it was just a fuckbuddy thing, to be honest, when nothing got announced after that – until you had a breakdown and he ran off _with_ you, rather than trying to stop you.”

“It’s not a fucking breakdown, _Rabbit_ ,” Richie says, exhaling especially hard into the receiver just to hear Roger mutter. “One of our friends from middle school had a… a bad thing happen to them – real life shattering stuff. Shocked me so bad I threw up, you know? You saw.”

“…Our friend from _middle_ school,” Roger repeats slowly, his voice going in and out slightly with an evident lean back away from his phone. He proceeds to go silent for a few seconds, then takes a loud breath. “Our. _Our_ friend… Wait, so… _Wait_ , Edward was… _your_ friend in middle school?”

“Did you not know that?” Richie says, listening to the sputtering on the other end of the line. He lilts his voice, mocking, “I thought everyone knew that.”

“Uh, no,” Roger says, going quiet for a few seconds longer, then clicking his tongue. “That’s… Okay, I guess. Did you guys get done with that – that crisis, then? Are you going to be in Indianapolis?”

“Yep, crisis, uh… _done_ ,” Richie says, shifting his jaw slightly, then rolling his eyes at himself and letting some irritation bleed into his tone. “Pretty sure Eddie told you that.”

Rogers scoffs loud through the speaker in a flood of white noise. “He did, but the mouthy bastard covers for all your shit and he’s impossible to argue with.”

Richie barks out a laugh, stepping between the pumps. “Right. Uh, we’ll be there. I’m not having a breakdown.”

“Good,” Roger says, and there’s an echo-y shout in the background, vaguely like Roger’s name. “I got to go – I’ll text Edward on Monday.”

“Ye- _bye_ ,” Richie says, dropping the phone from his ear with a sigh through his nose, looking up and slipping to the other side of the Cadillac. He takes a few moments to ogle, feeling allowed, and because fuck, it is _distracting_ how plain cool the beard and the stab wound, the red jacket and the sunglasses combined make Eddie look. He appears nothing like a man who carries around wet wipes and wears a phone holster, or who knows a thousand and one facts about food poisoning, but he is, he’s just Eddie, and Richie is going to get this dork some tennis shorts for his birthday.

He’s going to treat _himself_.

“What?” Eddie greets flatly, hooking the fuel dispenser back into place.

Richie clears his throat, deciding to just come out with it. _Hah_. “Why does everyone in the agency think we’ve been boning it up since like 2014?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie says idly, ripping a receipt from the pump, then looking over to Richie with a brow raised behind his sunglasses. “They’re nearly as stupid as you.”

Richie slides a step sideways, just that bit closer, feeling his stupid heart flutter while he settles an arm around Eddie’s waist and digs his chin into his shoulder to hum skeptically in his ear; it’s somehow that much more intimate now than it ever was before, even for a simple joke. “Yeah, but Roger said that Mellie _asked_ you if you were cool with ‘our relationship’ ever going public like years ago, and you said… you were?”

Eddie goes still for a beat, then answers with a surprisingly unabashed smirk, reaching up and patting just a little _too_ condescendingly along Richie’s jaw.

“You are…” Richie takes a breath, looking up for a moment down the street, then looking back down to Eddie with a grin growing helplessly across his mouth. “Such a terror – I just keep forgetting because you’re so cute. I’m going to tweet that, by the way, because you said it wasn’t a problem; tell the whole world all those things I’ve said about you were meant with love.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, stepping away with a shove at Richie’s sternum. “Get away from me, you dreamy fuck.”

“Okay, no,” Richie says, pulling out his phone and taking a quick picture of Eddie, his brow furrowed while he adds the receipt in his hand to a budgeting app. “I’m for real tweeting you said _that_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can also be found on twitter [ @ ezlebe](https://twitter.com/ezlebe?lang=en)


End file.
